


the devil's got nothing on me, my friend

by confidentialityspice



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, Crossover, F/M, Frank learns to listen to his heartbeat, Gen, Jessica Jones (TV) Spoilers, Post-Season 2, bonding over coffee
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-25
Updated: 2016-05-20
Packaged: 2018-06-03 17:02:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 29,101
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6618883
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/confidentialityspice/pseuds/confidentialityspice
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He can't survive without the war.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. chapter one

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I found you that day by your heartbeat,” Red adds, turning to follow Frank to the roof access door. “You were being tortured, I heard that sound for miles, but then you were quiet and I had only your heartbeat to follow. And do you know what I heard?”
> 
> Frank pauses at the door despite himself, turning to look at Red expectantly. The other man’s head is cocked again, like a cat almost, like he’s got Frank’s number.
> 
> “Nothing,” he says finally. “I heard nothing. No change. No increase or decrease. It was just… steady. Strong and steady. Like you weren’t being tortured at all. Like you weren’t about to die.”

He can’t survive without the war.

He learns it slowly over time, across battlefields shaped like alleyways and rooftops, in ditches filled with garbage and on street corners covered in blood. He stands on fire escapes like it's a war zone, the lights of New York City glowing ambivalently in the distance. He can’t function without blood on his skin, without bruises on his face, without wounds on his body. If he goes too long without a mission (because that’s what he calls them: missions) then he gets anxious and restless.

It’s what takes him out of the city for a while. It’s in his veins, the metro pulse pumping in time to his own heartbeat, but he woke up in a cold sweat one night on his dingy mattress, paralyzed with fear, and he left the city later that day, leaving behind no trace of himself besides the terror he'd instilled in the criminals.

Tampa was a good distraction, as distractions go. Taking down a well-connected, plastic-faced mob boss and his entire network was no small task, but Tampa is a shithole, and that’s saying something when home, to you, is a place called Hell’s Kitchen.

A month of bloodbath in the Kitchen followed by four months of meticulous planning, infiltration, and murder in the swamps of Florida, and the Punisher finds himself standing on the rooftop across from Metro General once more, the butt of an M4 pressed into his shoulder as his itchy finger rests on the trigger guard.

The familiar mop of strawberry blond hair appears from the guest entrance, pausing for an instant to dig a cell phone out of a pocket. He'd tracked that head for four days, waiting for the right moment, and he can taste the anticipation now as his left hand curls under the hand guard.

Inhale. One batch, two batch.

He leans forward slightly, focusing on the familiar features slightly distorted by the rifle scope. One quarter turn to the left, and suddenly the profile is in stark relief with the hospital lighting pouring out onto the sidewalk.

His finger twitches from the trigger guard to the trigger.

Penny and dime. Exhale. _CRACK._

It’s a satisfying sound, one he hasn’t heard in months as the shot echoes through the streets of Hell’s Kitchen. The target crumbles to the ground, his blood splattering the wall behind him.

“God _dammit_ , Frank!”

He curses under his breath and turns to find an out-of-breath and furious Daredevil charging up behind him. Frank puts up his hands in surrender, remembering a second too late that the visual gesture would be lost on the other man, and says, “Easy, Red, that’s the only shot for tonight.”

Matt Murdock stops ten feet away, gnashing his teeth and twitching his head around in his odd way. “Do you ever think about the people who have to find that body?” he asks finally, in his usual exasperated, holier-than-thou way.

Damn if Frank didn’t miss the little punk. “It’s good to see you, too.”

“I mean it, Frank, no more bloodshed --”

“That scum was following _your_ girlfriend around for the past week,” Frank growls, releasing the magazine from the rifle and pulling back the charging handle to eject the bullet in the chamber. He tosses the rifle down into its case with a little too much enthusiasm. “He’s a low-level member of the Kitchen Irish and he was tailing her with an intent to abduct her. And I don’t think I have to remind you what happens to the people they kidnap.”

Red at least has the decency to look mollified, shifting his weight as he tries to come up with a valid argument. Predictably, he finally lands on the most irrelevant response imaginable: “Karen isn’t my girlfriend.”

Frank scoffs, shutting his case and snapping the locks. “Screwed that up, did you?”

“It wasn’t meant to be.” Typical evasive maneuvers. Might as well be chained to a chimney again.

“Nothing to do with the lady who died in your arms that night, is it?” Frank asks knowingly, and he’s not in the habit of throwing punches without their intended power, but judging by Red’s change in disposition, his sharp intake of breath and his stiffening spine, maybe this one time, he threw a punch he never even knew would land. “Sorry,” he mutters, feeling that unfamiliar twinge of… regret?... somewhere in his chest. “Who was she?”

“An old friend,” Red says in that same deflective way, and Frank gives up the topic. It’s not like he really cared, anyway. “And Karen’s not exactly heartbroken. She knows my identity now, and she’s furious.”

Impossible girl. Frank shakes his head, incredulous that she’d ignored his advice and let the only real thing in her life slip away. She must enjoy being obtuse and contrary.

“Your heart rate increases slightly when I talk about her,” Red says suddenly. “Did you know that?”

“I know you’re full of shit, standing ten feet away from me pretending to be a goddamn EKG.”

“You care for her,” Red continues as if Frank hadn’t said anything. “Admit it -- it’s okay if you do. I care for people too -- my best friend, and this nurse I know, and yeah, Karen. It doesn’t make us weak, Frank.”

Frank grunts and shoulders his ammo bag, making to walk past Red and leave this conversation -- and tacit friendship -- as quickly as possible.

“I found you that day by your heartbeat,” Red adds, turning to follow Frank to the roof access door. “You were being tortured, I heard that sound for miles, but then you were quiet and I had only your heartbeat to follow. And do you know what I heard?”

Frank pauses at the door despite himself, turning to look at Red expectantly. The other man’s head is cocked again, like a cat almost, like he’s got Frank’s number.

“Nothing,” he says finally. “I heard nothing. No change. No increase or decrease. It was just… steady. Strong and steady. Like you weren’t being tortured at all. Like you weren’t about to die.”

“When you got nothing to live for, you don’t tend to be afraid of dying,” Frank says, with no shortage of bravado.

“No, I’ve met men who have nothing to live for,” Red continues doggedly, taking a few steps toward Frank. “They’re stoic and they fight like hell, but I hear it. Every single time.”

“Military training. Bloodlust. Grief. Take your pick, Red. A heartbeat is a heartbeat.”

“Yeah, it is. And yours only changes when you talk about Karen Page.”

Frank feels it that time, like his own body is magnified now that Red’s pointed it out. He feels his heart rate increase at these words, and he’s furious at the betrayal. “It’s none of your goddamn business --”

“I’m not here to tell you to go to her!” Red snaps irritably. “But if you care for anything in this world, if you care for one single person, then how does that fit into your plan? How do you keep killing in the name of revenge when it hurts the one person you care about?”

“I’m sure she’d be furious to learn that I killed the man who would have abducted, tortured, and killed her,” Frank says sarcastically. “You’re on the wrong path here, Red. You’re trying to appeal to my humanity, but you’re assuming I have any leftover. I don’t.”

“It’s not humanity that brought you to this rooftop to protect her?” Red asks incredulously. “You just happened to be walking by with a sniper rifle and enough ammo to take out a militia?”

_You do this and I am done! That’s it, you’re dead to me! Do you hear me?_

“It wasn’t humanity,” Frank says in a low voice, wrenching open the door. “It was repaying a debt.”

“What debt is that?” Red asks in disbelief, but Frank’s already got one foot on the staircase.

“Helping me remember.”

_I’m already dead._

 

* * *

 

He wages war on Hell’s Kitchen, dogged by the Devil at every turn, but he’s undeterred by moral compasses and lectures on the greater good. As far as he’s concerned, he is the greater good, he’s just doing it in a way that few others have the stomach to accomplish.

He tries not to listen to his heartbeat, but he becomes attuned to it over time, starting with those quiet nights in a dingy warehouse loft, where it seems to echo off of his arsenal of guns and ammunition.

Just steady. Strong and steady.

When he can’t sleep, he tests it. He thinks of his family, and it races, it beats so hard and so fast that it chokes him. He thinks of the Kitchen Irish, of the fucker he killed at point-blank range, or the grenades he launched at the Dogs of Hell, and his heart rate returns to normal. He thinks of Wilson Fisk and his bombastic threats, of the beatdown and the ultimatum. Strong and steady. He thinks of the men he killed in pursuit of the Blacksmith, and no change at all.

He thinks of a cup of coffee, of a load of bullshit, of a tense expression of incredulity and a shy “You never lie to me.”

It picks up again, just enough to notice. Nothing compared to the agony of his memories, but enough to present a problem.

He tests it time and time again, on sleepy nights doing reconnaissance on decrepit rooftops, on lazy mornings sitting at the park drinking a coffee, on rainy nights when he prowls the streets in his overcoat, just walking, walking, walking, testing his heart rate and trying to control it, to no avail.

He hasn’t seen her since the night he killed her stalker, and he takes care to avoid the places in the neighborhood where she’s sure to turn up -- the Bulletin, the old law office, her new apartment… the diner. He gets restless sometimes, like he wants to check on her, and then he checks his heart rate and changes his mind.

He has no room for that sort of thing in his life, not when he’s so actively courting death.

He continues his work for another six weeks, systematically working his way through the major criminal elements in the Kitchen. He even eats a little bit into the Russian mob, which had tried to stage a coup in the absence of Fisk and the Irish, but it had all comes to a head when the mob is confronted by the tattered remains of the Cartel, and their sparring match concludes in a bloodbath that spells the end of the Cartel for good and sends the mob back underground to regroup. (Or so he thinks.) This leaves Frank on rooftops picking off some of the more productive muggers and rapists in the neighborhood, one at a time, biding his time for his next battle.

Red backs off, seemingly distracted by something to do with the Hand, and Frank’s able to move freely throughout the city for two weeks before they cross paths again.

 

* * *

 

He heard her crying that night.

He’d disposed of the body, taken stock of the gun cache, and had started his plans to haul them all to a safe place, and he’d made it back to the road before he remembered she was there.

She was huddled in the glow of the headlights, hugging herself and sobbing so harshly that her body was convulsing. He drew back into the shadows of the woods, carefully closing off his emotions to focus on the task at hand.

Sometimes he goes back to the cabin. Sometimes he stays there until she drops dead. Most of the time, he stumbles into the street and she turns around, shocked, as his face smashes into the asphalt, and then he jerks awake, awash in a cold sweat, his heart thumping uncomfortably.

 

* * *

 

He thinks he’s dreaming again when he hears it. He’s so convinced of the dream that his body gives a violent jerk to wake him up, but he’s already awake, crouched on a fire escape, running surveillance on a bar that had exploded six months ago.

She’s walking toward him, except she can’t see him, he knows she can’t see him, he’s six stories up and she’s walking with her head bowed. He has a moment of pure insanity, where he considers dropping down six stories to land in front of her, just to see that face again, just to register whether she’s still angry or if she’s relieved or downright happy --

But she passes right below him, and instead of dropping down, he’s climbing up. He follows her for three blocks, then she turns and walks another four, and she’s back at her apartment. By the time she’s back, she’s composed herself, he can tell by the steely edge to her spine, her purposeful walk. Her lights stay on for another three hours, and he just sits there and watches, his heart rate elevated, his mind running through scenarios that will never happen.

 

* * *

 

“It’s an anniversary.”

Frank starts and curses under his breath. Fucking Red, always sneaking up on him like a cat, nine lives and all. He’s standing on the other side of the building, his hands resting at his sides peculiarly, like he’s trying to appear casual but he’s more than prepared to sling a weapon at Frank if the situation calls for it.

“I heard her crying. And then I heard you following her.”

Irritated, Frank rounds on him. “You know you don’t have to wear the mask, right, Red? I know who you are.”

Murdock’s lip curls. “Plausible deniability?”

“Consider a voice modulator, then.”

Frank returns his attention to the dark apartment, uneasy. Unmasking the friendly foe had felt like a power move a second ago; now, it seems like they’ve established a more intimate relationship, somehow. He’s curious about her tears, too, but he doesn’t want to appear eager for information.

Then his heart rate accelerates. Shit.

“His name was Ben Urich,” Murdock says with a note of smugness. “Did she tell you about him?”

“No,” he grunts. She’d _told_ him very little. What she’d expressed, though, could fill a seven-part book series.

“He was a reporter for the _Bulletin_ ,” Murdock continues gravely. “He was killed a year ago today, by Wilson Fisk.”

Several pieces of her story fall into place as the news sinks in. The car she’d inherited with the tapes. The zest for investigative reporting. The burden of loss she carries with her.

“If you’re thinking of dropping in to check on her, don’t. Yours is not a face she’d want to see today.”

“Mine’s not a face she wants to see any day, Red,” Frank says tonelessly. “Where have you been, anyway? I’ve gotten away with a hell of a lot of murders in the last couple of weeks, I was starting to wonder if I’d ever hear a lecture again.”

“I’ve had other matters to attend to.”

Mm. Vagueness. What a refreshing change of pace. “You know, Red, she loved you. You can hear pulses and smell pheromones and maybe even read auras, all that crazy bullshit you claim to know, but you missed the one thing that was right in front of you the whole time.”

“I know she loved me.” Murdock shakes his head incredulously. “But these things don’t always work out. And like you, I had the good sense to walk away from it before it became damaging --”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Frank says, rage prickling the back of his neck as he straightens away from the edge of the roof. “I didn’t walk away from mine. It was ripped from me, it was gunned down in a park in the middle of the day. Everything I do now is because I’ll never have that again -- I’ll never hold my kids again. If I had them back right now, do you think I’d be stupid enough to push them away?”

That seems to quell whatever self-righteous bullshit Murdock had been planning to throw out. Instead he clenches his fists and shifts his weight to his heels, like he can sense Frank’s rage (which, he probably can). They stand there for a moment, squared off, ready to come to blows if one of them makes the wrong move, and then Murdock takes a step back.

“Seeya around, Frank,” he mutters, giving Frank an ironic little salute as he hops off the opposite side of the building.

Frank would never know the truth, the secret that Matt carries around with like a talisman, the secret that let him off the hook so that his feelings for another woman wouldn’t be clouded by guilt. Frank would never know that Matt heard her heartbeat in her grief, that it was more than loss and regret in those soft cries, that it was a howling firestorm of devastation. He’ll never know that Matt sat there, ducked behind metal barrels, listening to Karen Page as she mourned the death of the man she loved.

 

* * *

 

It was the last time he saw Red for a while. For three weeks, to be exact. Three weeks of everything going to absolute shit.

It starts at a pawn shop, where Frank, decked out in street clothes and a baseball cap, is foiled in his attempt to buy an MK-11 of dubious previous ownership. He’s accosted by three men in masks, and armed with only his 1911 and a switchblade, he comes off worse in the fight than he would’ve hoped. The end result is a pawn shop covered in other people's blood and a wizened old owner who is howling his indignation as Frank leaves through the front door. 

He’d chalked it up to happenstance. It’s not like he frequents the safest parts of the neighborhood, and pawn shops are robbed all the time. Wrong place, wrong time, probably.

But it happens again, this time with seven men, and it’s on a street corner as he’s exiting a bodega just after sundown. He spills his trail mix into the street, and soon the nuts and berries are mixed with blood. He’s better armed this time, but less certain that it's a coincidence. 

Bruises bloom across his face, arms, and torso that night, his nose is broken again, and he has a gash on his eyebrow that would put an MMA fighter to shame.

The third time he’s ambushed, it’s not even a surprise. They follow him into an alley where, unbeknownst to the ten attackers, he’s hidden a cache of guns including his AK-47. That creates a racket, with the rifle shots thundering down the alley and eliciting cries from passersby as they scramble for cover, and in the end, Frank is surrounded by ten dead bodies, lots of blood, and the acrid smell of gunpowder.

It’s a professional hit, for a bounty out on his head. He gleans this from one of their cell phones, as he scrolls through the texts and directions from a blocked number until he comes across a picture of himself…

And a picture of them at the diner that night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fic title comes from the song "Beekeeper" by Keaton Henson. This chapter includes references to the 2004 movie "The Punisher" starring Thomas Jane. If the NSA is watching, yes, this is why there's so much research on guns in my Google history. 
> 
> The views on Tampa, Florida, expressed in this fic are not the views of the author.


	2. chapter two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You know he died, right? Frank Castle died. Not at the carousel, not after they pulled the plug, not after he was tortured and brought back from the brink where you found him chained up in a hospital bed. He died the day I burned down his house, turned all of his memories to ashes, and put on this vest.” He taps his chest for emphasis, even though the vest is covered by a t-shirt.
> 
> “I don’t believe that,” she says resolutely. “You’re still Frank Castle, he’s still somewhere in there, you’re just determined to be a monster because it’s easier than -- than -- than feeling something.”
> 
> “What, like love?” he asks scathingly.

The day the district attorney had been killed, Frank followed Karen for almost six hours before he was able to approach her. She’d gone to the newspaper, then a shitty motel, and then to her even shittier apartment, and he’d given her approximately twenty seconds before he took out her cop bodyguards.

He hadn’t expected her piece, or the conviction in her expression, or the complete lack of fear in her voice as she’d pointed that .380 between his eyes.

_It wasn’t me._

She’d only stepped closer, angrier and more determined, and he’d surrendered to her. That’s what scares him the most, these days: that he put his hands up as a gun was pointed at him.

He hadn’t even gotten his bearings in her living space -- kitchen to the left, bed straight ahead, desk to the right -- when he heard the telltale pops.

He breathed her in as plaster rained down on them, not on purpose, but it happened all the same. He'd gotten whiffs of it before, something clean and faintly floral, but not sickeningly sweet or overbearing. It could be addicting, if he were a more susceptible man, but his addictions and vices lay elsewhere. 

She flinched beneath him as her belongings were destroyed, and he was in the most absurd poses, as if his body could shield her from armor-piercing bullets. When it was all over, he’d pushed her out at a crouch, and she bounced off the opposite wall in the hallway as she stumbled away from the danger.

It was the second-scariest moment of his post-trial life.

 

* * *

 

Her new apartment is situated in a slightly nicer building, a little further uptown and across the street from one of those trendy discount gyms. It’s not much nicer, however, since no one gives Frank, with his multitude of bruises and cuts covered only by his baseball cap, a second look as he makes his way to her door.

He knocks, three sharp raps, and feels his heart beating faster as he listens for movement inside the apartment. When the silence stretches for too long, he starts to worry that she’s already been taken, and then softly, through the door, “Who is it?”

There’s no peephole, but he can’t bring himself to say his name, not when anyone could be listening in. He rubs his index finger against his thumb. “It’s me.”

This silence feels more loaded, and it seems to stretch on for so long that he wonders if he imagined her voice, until she says, “I thought you were already dead.”

He’s relieved, that’s why he lets out a chuckle. “I deserved that. Can I come in?”

He can almost feel the hesitation and resentment through the door, but she’s always been a curious one, and ultimately he figures that’s what unlocks her door.

At least that’s what he tells himself, until he sees her face.

She doesn’t open the door more than five inches, just enough to fit her face through the opening to fix him with a scathing glare. He meets her gaze dead on, schooling his expression into polite curiosity as he tilts his head to the side to study her.

She’s put on weight, a negligible amount, but enough to indicate that she’s eating at least two meals a day and is getting a good amount of sleep. Her hair is pulled into a haphazard knot at the back of her head, reminiscent of the first time he’d seen her, except she’s not tearing down a hospital corridor in terror as he advances on her with a modified Mossberg 500. She’s in a cotton t-shirt and shorts, her feet bare and her face clear of makeup.

The scent memory almost bowls him over as soon as it hits him. For a moment he thinks of the odd companionship they'd stricken, the shared pain and deep silences that lay between them as he was chained to a bed. He had barely known the girl, he’d spent a grand total of maybe two days in her presence, so why does she affect him so deeply? 

(Somewhere, Red is listening to this shitshow on a rooftop and laughing his ass off at Frank's erratic heartbeat.)

She hasn’t said anything, hasn’t changed expression except to scan her eyes down his body to check for guns, maybe, and she hasn’t moved an inch. He gives her what he hopes is an affecting smile and says the only thing he can think of: “M’am.”

There it is, that hint of good humor that never really leaves her eyes. It flashes in an instant and then she’s scoffing, a thin cover for her slip-up, but he’ll take it. “What do you want, Frank?”

“I gotta talk to you about this.”

He holds up the cell phone, which is still caked with drying blood, and she goes pale as she looks at the picture.

“Where did you get that?”

“Off the guy that tried to plug me an hour ago,” Frank says gravely. “He and his nine buddies, they didn’t come off too well in that fight.”

The anger and hostility are gone, replaced now with anxious concern as she swings her door open and gestures for him to come in.

The apartment is nice, reminiscent of the one that got shot up all those months ago, except the kitchen is at the back and she’s gotten a new bed. The biggest difference between then and now is the stacks; folders and old newspapers and boxes on top of boxes, all organized but overwhelming, lining the walls and covering most of the flat surfaces, including the middle of her area rug.

It’s miles above his living conditions (he showers at the YMCA, after all) but it still evokes that same loner feeling that his own makeshift loft does when he’s there all by himself, except instead of being surrounded by guns, she’s surrounded by papers.

“What is all this?” he asks, nudging one of the boxes with the toe of his boot as he carefully steps around some dubious crime scene photos.

“Research,” she says repressively, clearing off a space for him to sit at her kitchen table.

“You still got that writing gig?”

She cuts him another scathing look; he might’ve been premature in assuming the hostility was gone. “If you mean my job at the Bulletin, yes, I still have it.”

He gives up on his lame attempt at small talk, it’s not like they ever did that sort of thing anyway. Still, this apartment looks more like a crazy person’s lair than a writer’s den, and he glances over the papers he passes as he makes his way to her small kitchen. He drops down into the open chair and whips off his hat, tossing it onto the table.

That was his first mistake.

“Jesus Christ, Frank,” she breathes as soon as she catches sight of his face. “Did you spend the last six months just getting continually pummeled?”

He attempts another ingratiating smile as he points at his busted mug. “Oh, this? Nah, I earned all of this in the last week or so.” He tosses the phone onto the table, and she pulls a face at someone else’s blood getting smeared on her eating surface.

“Do you even feel those?” she asks, her hand coming up to touch her own cheekbone in indication. “At all?”

“‘Course I do,” he says gruffly.

“So you take painkillers?”

He shakes his head. “Not worth it. Dulls the senses, slows the reflexes.”

“Wouldn’t want that,” she says dryly.

He can’t help the indulgent smile that he feels creeping across his face like an intruder. He jabs at the phone, his tone a little more friendly as he asks, “Any idea who took this picture?”

Her expression hardens as she sits down across from him. “You’re the one who set that up. I was your pawn, remember? Maybe the two guys you killed --”

“No, it’s surveillance, not a grainy cell phone shot,” Frank says oppressively, pointing at her face in the picture. “They were up higher, maybe a fire escape, and they were photographing you.”

That brings her up short, and he takes the opportunity to examine his surroundings. Despite the clutter of her papers and folders, the apartment is clean and looks like it’s never been shot through with semi-automatic weapons. The windows are east-facing but the curtains are drawn. She doesn’t own a TV, but why would she need one with all of this extracurricular reading she has to do?

Most importantly, there’s a half-eaten bowl of some sort of pasta sitting on her kitchen counter, just over her shoulder. He’s already salivating before he even asks, “You gonna finish that?”

She glances at him in confusion, then follows his line of sight to the pasta bowl. “Uh. No?” She grabs it and pushes it across the table to him, and he seizes the fork and just goes to town. He hadn’t realized how hungry he was until this precise moment.

He’s five bites in before he realizes she’s been watching him. He grunts, “Hmm?” at her around a mouthful of food.

“Nothing,” she says, the corners of her mouth tugging upward despite herself. “I’ve just never seen you eat before. I just assumed you subsisted on vengeance and coffee.”

“I’m not some other-worldly demigod,” Frank says, pretending to wield his fork like a giant hammer. “I still need to eat.”

“I’m pretty sure Thor eats, too,” she says with a laugh, and that's the sound that finally breaks the tension between them. He sets down his fork and places his elbows on the table, folding his hands in front of his face as his index finger rubs his knuckles.

“You didn’t listen to me,” he says finally. “My advice about holding on with both hands, from the last time we spoke?”

That would be his second mistake.

“That wasn’t the last time we spoke,” she says softly, her eyes burning with anger. “The last time we spoke, you didn’t listen to me.”

He rolls his eyes and sits back in his chair, annoyed. “Oh, here we go.”

“You made a choice that night --”

His voice is a low rumble, like the words are being ripped from his very soul against his will. “I didn’t make that choice that night, I made it _every_ night, _every_ time I pointed the barrel of a gun at a man and decided that the world would be better off without him -- that you would be better off without him!”

Her mouth falls open in horror. “Are you saying you killed him for -- for _me_?”

“I killed him for everybody he ever hurt,” he says, emphatically tapping the table with the tip of his index finger at each syllable. “My kids, my wife, your lawyer friend that caught a bullet, that bitch of a District Attorney, and yeah, you.”

“I asked you not to!” She says heatedly, blinking back tears that are surely from frustration and anger, nothing more. “I begged you, Frank, I begged you to make the right choice.”

He can’t stand the look on her face, can’t stand the anguish he’s indirectly caused her by removing a man from this world that had intended to kill her. If she even knew what he’s done since then, the choices he’s made for the express purpose of keeping her alive, keeping her safe… Choices he would make again and again, if faced with the option.

“Your right choice and my right choice are never gonna be the same choice, m’am,” he says hollowly.

That wounds her. He doesn’t need to hear her heartbeat to know that, it’s written all over her face as she tries to search his expression. “Frank…”

“You know he died, right? Frank Castle died. Not at the carousel, not after they pulled the plug, not after he was tortured and brought back from the brink where you found him chained up in a hospital bed. He died the day I burned down his house, turned all of his memories to ashes, and put on this vest.” He taps his chest for emphasis, even though the vest is covered by a t-shirt.

“I don’t believe that,” she says resolutely. “You’re still Frank Castle, he’s still somewhere in there, you’re just determined to be a monster because it’s easier than -- than -- than feeling _something_.”

“What, like love?” he asks scathingly, feeling his anger building, but this time, the hit doesn’t land. Instead of looking hurt or upset, her mouth twists cynically.

“No. Like friendship.”

She has this uncanny ability to shut him up. It continues taking him by surprise, even though he learned pretty quickly that she’s got a bead on him. He can’t think of a response to her statement that doesn’t sound disingenuous, or like a downright lie.

They both know he wouldn’t be here right now if he didn’t feel something.

He pushes those thoughts away, trying not to register her long legs, her bright blue eyes, the curve of her neck. “You’re in danger,” he says quietly. “And it’s my fault.”

“Who is it?”

“Dunno. Did a good job pissing off all the gangs lately. If I had a guess, I'd say the Russians are the only ones with the means and the funds to pull this off at the moment.”

She bites her lip. “The Russians haven't been active in the Kitchen since Fisk.”

“Yeah. They're all inactive until they're not anymore,” he says with a shrug. 

She looks troubled, but surely she's been in the city long enough to understand the mechanics of crime. In a perfect world, Frank would be able to wage war against gangs, cartels, and slave rings until it was all eradicated. Then he'd be able to retire on some farm upstate and spend his days doing mind-numbing shit like chopping wood and repairing tractors. 

But power begets power, and a void in Hell's Kitchen just means that someone else is gunning for that position. Frank knows the stakes, he knows that he's destined to die on a battlefield of sorts, and the sooner she gives up and accepts that, the easier it'll be for him. 

That's kind of the catch-22 with this one, though. He stares at her from across the table, truly appreciating the uphill battle he's facing with her for the first time. She doesn't give up.  

“You still got that .380?” he asks gruffly.

His third mistake.

She tilts her head, and then he hears an unmistakable rip of tape from under the table. A second later, he’s staring down the barrel of her Bersa Thunder .380 like déjà vu, teetering between certainty that she’ll pull the trigger and the instinct to disarm her and throw her to the ground.

“I made a choice, too, Frank,” she says softly, her eyes blazing. “I almost shot you that night.”

“You told me.”

“Sometimes I wish I had. I’d sleep better at night.”

His hands are resting palms down on the tabletop, on either side of his still unfinished pasta bowl. He could easily take that gun from her, she’s so close and she’s too focused on his microexpressions, and she underestimates his capacity for ruthlessness at every turn because he’s always held it back.

He could teach her. Scare her. Snatch that gun away, tackle her to the ground, pin her arms to her sides and press the barrel of her own gun to her temple, his finger itching along the trigger guard. He’d whisper his intentions into her ear like so many threats, run the gun along her jawline, make her tremble in fear so that she never, ever feels safe around him again.

He thinks about doing it, about scarring her psyche so badly that he never has to see that tenderness in her expression again, so that he doesn’t have to worry about her turning up and trying to save him anymore, so that the camaraderie is just a fleeting memory of someone else’s life. He could break that trust she thinks she feels, show her the animal he is deep inside, and shred the remains of his former life once and for all.

He really considers it, weighs the pros and cons as she tries to search his expression, and isn’t that the definition of a true monster? That he could break her so thoroughly in the space of sixty seconds and walk away telling himself he did the right thing?

Isn’t that what she’s already done to him?

His heart is pounding, he can feel it in his throat, and he’s fighting all of his instincts not to pounce as he forces his hands to remain flat on the table. “Me too,” he says softly, his voice shot through with some kind of pain.

She softens and lowers the gun, her eyes hooded. “I didn’t mean that…”

He chuckles. “You did, and I respect that.”

“I can’t leave town.” She places the gun on the table carefully, the barrel still pointed at Frank. It’s a challenge, and he forces himself to relax in front of it.

“I didn’t think you would.”

“So that’s why you’re here? To warn me?”

“Somethin’ like that.” He shoves up from the table, suddenly restless. The apartment is so small, made even smaller by the stacks of papers looming on every free surface. He wanders over to the area rug, where medical reports, maps, and crime scene photos are spread out in a semi-circle.

He pauses in front of the couch, his eye catching a picture on the left of a man lying dead on a very familiar looking carpet. Immediately he starts scanning the rest of the documents -- autopsy reports from hospitals, witness testimonies from anonymous tipsters, crime scene reports from the Tampa Police Department…

“Fuck,” he says under his breath, sinking onto the couch.

“You leave a telltale calling card,” she says, sitting beside him. “A certain clinical accuracy of the sniper shots. A tangible connection between this man --” she points at a newspaper clipping “-- Howard Saint, and your former CO, Schoonover, and their heroin business. And reports of a man wearing a vest bearing a white skull.”

He can’t look at her, he can’t look anywhere else but at the photos and documents splayed out before him.

“It’s not your usual MO,” she continues conversationally. “Boiling oil to the face, ballistic knife to the neck, and of course the dragging of Saint’s body through the streets before he was blown up by a car bomb.”

She’s watching the side of his face, he can feel the heat from it, but he can’t tear his eyes away. He's waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for the reason she’d regarded him with so much hatred when he’d turned up at her door.

“You killed his sons, Frank.”

He says nothing. He just stares at the photos, the endless stacks, the research she’s been compiling for months on his activities, on _him_. He feels oddly betrayed and somehow exposed, like the state lines had provided a buffer so that his actions in the swamp would never, ever touch her. He can’t look away from the papers, because if he does, he’ll look right at her, and he’ll crumble.

“You said you don’t hurt people who deserve it --”

“They deserved it.” He chokes it out like he’s dying. “They would’ve come after me -- after anyone connected to me -- it was in their blood to follow the corruption. They had to die.”

She chokes back a sob, and he thinks this, _this_ is what finally broke her. No gun to her head, no threats of lecherous actions and brutality, none of that is as effective as what he's just confessed. He understands her hatred now, why she’d pointed the gun between his eyes and rested her finger on the trigger. Frank Castle never would’ve killed those boys, but Frank Castle hadn't been sitting at her kitchen table, no, she had her gun sights trained on the Punisher.

“I read all of these files,” she says quietly. “I know what Howard Saint did. I know how much blood was on his hands. I saw the evidence that his sons were complicit in his business, that they'd killed a lot of people in the name of their father.”

It feels like he’s falling into a crevasse, but it’s not relief that’s threatening to engulf him as he raises his eyes to hers. “You saying I did the right thing?”

Her breathing is jagged, like she’s struggled with this very question for a long time. “I’m saying this time, maybe. Yeah. Maybe this time you did the right thing.”

_Just this once? No, no no no no, Red, that’s not how it works. You cross over to my side of the line, you don’t get to come back from that. Not ever._

He jumps up from the couch, too agitated, too emotional. It had been draining, to sit at that table at literal gunpoint, to sit beside her on that couch at metaphorical gunpoint, and  _not_ respond to it in the only way he knows how. It's all too much now, it hurts in a way he can't even describe, that he might've corrupted her so badly that she'd become just as jaded and rough as everyone around them. 

“Don’t you ever say that again,” he snarls, actively fighting the urge to punch a wall. “Don’t ever say that.”

His balancing act along the fringe of violence is evident to her; he sees real fear in her eyes as she exclaims, “Frank!”

“What I did was -- was _monstrous_ , was unforgivable, but I did what needed to be done!” he thunders. “It’s not down to you to let me off the hook, to make me feel better -- it’s down to you to keep living your life and _stay away from me_!” He kicks at one of the boxes, one that he's now sure contains information about him, and it topples over. 

“You came to _my_ door!” she argues, red-faced. 

“And now I’m leaving,” he snaps wildly, grabbing his hat from the table and crossing her apartment in three strides. “Stop following me, stop researching, stop caring about me, because I’m never gonna be the man you think you found in that hospital bed.”

He wishes the slam of her door was a satisfying sound.

 

* * *

 

She’d disappeared into that ostentatious house, and he knew he only had five minutes, maybe six, to make his move. He was acting on suspicion, on impulse, having staked out the CO’s house for two days before he’d seen that wretched old car roll into the driveway. _Of fucking course._ He was dead, for all intents and purposes, and she was still digging. 

And she had no idea she was walking into her certain death, that he’d certainly led her there, because he’d led her to believe Schoonover was an ally. Suddenly, it became imperative to get her out alive, if only to make up for his mistake in luring her in. He gazed at the car, formulating a plan.

He saw shadows on the curtains and stole out into the street, crossing into the driveway and ducking down on the passenger side of her car. He made quick work of breaking in, of reaching into the glovebox, of shoving the cassette tape into the player and pressing the power button so that it would play on startup. He’s in and out in less than a minute, but it still feels too long.

It’s interminable, waiting for a gunshot or for an emergence. He must’ve crouched for at least fifteen minutes in the underbrush of the woods across the street, but it might as well have been fifteen years for all he knew. When the door finally opened to her distinctive silhouette, Frank knew a millisecond of relief before he realized she was at gunpoint.

The car started, and “Shining Star” blasted so loudly that it echoed through the neighborhood. It played for only a few seconds before it was shut off, but he knew in his bones that she’d gotten the message, that she realized he must be alive and nearby.

It’s why he felt no remorse when he t-boned that piece of shit car ten minutes later.

 

* * *

 

He prowls home blindly, spoiling for a fight, dying for a reason to put his Glock in someone’s mouth and pull the trigger, but no one crosses him for six blocks.

He half expects Red to be waiting for him at his makeshift loft, ready for another round of browbeating, but when his living quarters are empty of interfering superheroes, he wonders briefly if Red is in a gutter somewhere with a katana through the heart.

He doesn’t sleep that night. He takes apart four of his rifles and two of his shotguns and cleans them meticulously, listening to his steady heartbeat as his fingers move along the cool metal. He loads up the magazines of both of his Smith and Wessons, his Sig 1911, and his snub-nosed Colt, and holsters all of them under his jacket. He counts his ammo and packs it into a shoulder bag. He throws on his bandolier full of ammo for his minigun, which he shoulders as he leaves the apartment under the inky darkness of pre-twilight.

He hadn’t realized it, but he was preparing for war.

Just before sunrise finds him standing on the corner of 11th and 49th, his right hand resting on the barrels of his minigun as he uses his left hand to fling a grenade into a seemingly abandoned warehouse.

It’s only when he’s raining bullets into a wall of human men, gunning down criminals and rapists and dirtbags of the lowest order, that Frank feels something like peace.

 

* * *

 

It’s all over the news the next day, except that Frank’s name isn’t on anyone’s lips.

Instead, the city seems to breathe a sigh of relief that the Cesare crime family, one of the most prolific Italian mob families in the borough, is reeling from the loss of some of their more prominent family members.

 

* * *

 

He returns to the diner that day, but he crosses the street instead of going inside. There are no fire escapes on the two-story building, so he breaks in and climbs to the roof.

The angle is wrong, he can tell as soon as he holds up the photo. He walks the length of the building, but it’s too low; the photographer would’ve been at least two storeys higher.

That’s how he ends up on the fourth-floor fire escape of the building next door. With a telephoto lens and plenty of patience… Yes. The angle is perfect.

It had definitely been the work of a professional, possibly a PI but likely a private contractor. Other than that, the fire escape is a dead end.

 

* * *

 

It’s a hole in the wall diner on the edge of the Kitchen, practically in the Garment District, and he’s only been there three times in the past six weeks, but it’s one of his favorites. The coffee is sludge and the eggs are greasy but the waitresses don’t ask questions and there’s a booth in the back that has a broken light fixture, perfect for hiding out and recalibrating. He sits there for at least an hour, his mind carefully blank, his hand on the Sig 1911 that’s resting on his thigh.

He’s on his fourth cup of coffee, not even close to the jitters, but his heart rate is picking up before the bell even tinkles above the door, and then suddenly there she is, silhouetted by the mid-morning sun. He ducks his head in an attempt to shield his face from view with his baseball cap, but he’s always known he has a distinctive posture, and it’ll only be a matter of time before she recognizes him.

Luckily the diner is crowded with people who are fans of the $2 breakfast special, and Frank breathes a sigh of relief as he watches her wend her way to an open table. She’s almost sitting down when her head pops up.

He curses inwardly as she hesitates for a moment, and then she’s approaching his table in an exaggerated showing of shyness. “Excuse me,” she says in a voice that carries at least three tables over. “Do you mind if I sit? There’s a glare over there…”

He fixes her with a hard look, then gestures for her to take the open chair across from him.

“Thanks!” she says brightly, dropping her files onto the table as she folds her long legs under the table, her strawberry blonde hair falling forward like a curtain around her face.

He wants to ask what the hell she’s doing here. He wants to ask why she’s risking being seen with him. He wants to ask what this act is all about. He wants to run, wants to shoot, wants to spray bullets all over the city just to feel combat again, for that reassurance that blood for blood is the answer to his ongoing conundrum.

But he stays rooted to the spot, stuck by her eyes, her presence, by the way she commands his attention. He feels centered, all of a sudden, like war could wait, like killing and dying could wait, like there’s nothing else in the world he needs to be doing other than sitting across from this woman and drinking coffee.

Maybe it’s because she’s not running and screaming and condemning him as a monster. Maybe it’s because he knows she’s rifling through the Saint files right in front of him. Maybe it’s because she’s the one thing tethering him to reality in a neighborhood where girls are lifting up cars, men are surviving bar explosions, and a good little Catholic boy is running around in pyjamas under the guise of saving the world.

The waitress places a mug of coffee in front of her, and she wraps her hands around it like it’s a talisman, but not in the hunted and fearful way she once had all those months ago. “You can put that away,” she mutters, swirling her cup. He cocks his head at her, then he feels a sharp jab in his thigh from her knee. “That,” she clarifies. “You’re not risking all of these people with that.”

He glares at her, then withdraws the 1911 and reholsters it surreptitiously.

“How'd you find me?” he growls, angry that he'd been traceable, somehow.

She ignores the question. “Quite a number last week. The Cesare family, that was you.”

“You here to lecture me, m’am, because I know a guy in a red jumpsuit who can do it better than you.”

“I told you that night, I think sometimes your methods are justified --”

“That’s bullshit.”

She ducks her head, a disbelieving smile spreading across her face. “Frank.”

“You’re comin’ in here like I asked for justification, like I need peace. I believe in what I’m doing, but that’s my mission. It’s not yours.”

There it is again, that haunted look she’d worn every time she sat across from him in that cold prison visitation room. He'd know that look anywhere, he'd seen it on countless soldier's faces during and after the war.

“What _is_ your mission?” he asks, curiosity getting the better of him.

She gives him a wary look. “What?”

“C’mon. We both know your bid to save me wasn’t really about me at all,” he says conversationally, draining his coffee mug and signalling the waitress for more. “It was something else, something personal. I saw the look in your eyes; it was like looking into a mirror. You have blood on your hands.”

She scoffs, her eyes back on her coffee.

“A person who holds a gun and points it right between a man’s eyes, they don’t do it with your level of conviction unless they’ve taken a life before,” he continues. “Who was it?”

“No one you’d know.”

“Anyone someone would miss?”

She regards him for a second, then she practically whispers, “Only Wilson Fisk.”

He mutters a curse, but she’d be dead if Fisk had any idea. She’s tough as nails and resourceful as hell, but Fisk is well-connected and, well, muggings happen every day in this city.

Still, it gives context to her whole crusade to shorten his sentence, to keep him out of gen pop, to try to get him committed. It makes him appreciate all the more that she didn’t squeeze the trigger that night, and it even helps him understand why she might be willing to condone his nightly excursions.

“Look,” she says softly, her eyes downcast as she pushes a thin folder toward him across the tabletop. “I tracked you down for a reason. I spent most of the week getting information on the men who tried to jump you that night.”

He makes a noise of disbelief. “I told you to stay out of it --”

“The leader, the only one missing his cell phone, his name was Christopher Dalton. He was a prolific contract killer with no discernible loyalty to any one gang or organization,” she continues in a hurried whisper. “He’s killed for the Cartel, for the Skinheads, and there are even rumors that the government has employed him for some of their covert ops.”

Frank pores over the list of known associates she’d assembled, and has to admit that he’s grudgingly impressed. Must’ve been one hell of an asset at Nelson and Murdock before that whole sham operation went belly-up.

“I kept digging and finally found a lead,” she adds, reaching over to flip the page. Her hand brushes against his and he jerks it back in surprise, but if she notices anything amiss, she ignores it as she points at a name. “His wife’s name is Alexandria Dalton, maiden name Kurtzkova. Her father is a high ranking member of the Russian mob operating out of Brighton Beach.”

“So it's the Russians,” he says in resignation, sitting back heavily. Fucking Ruskies. They're just as tough as any other gang in the city, except they have more funding.

“I’m saying it’s a lead,” she says emphatically. “I can do more research, find out what reason they might have for wanting you dead --”

“No. You stay the hell away from this,” he says bluntly, snatching the folder out from under her hands and stowing it in his coat. “You get far away from this and you stop researching it, or you’ll wind up dead.”

She rolls her eyes. “I’m not scared of them, Frank --”

“Yeah? Good for you. I hear lack of fear is keeping a lot of people alive today, especially when they’re poking around the Russian mob.”

She snaps her mouth shut, glaring at him with every ounce of hatred she could muster, he was sure.

“People like me? We need a reason to fight,” he says quietly. “We fight for the people who can’t fight for themselves. We fight for the ones just trying to make an honest living. We fight for the ones who are obeying the rule of law. We fight for people who aren’t stupid enough to put themselves in harm’s way.”

Her cheeks are red, whether with shame or anger, it’s hard to tell.

“People like me need to believe that good people are out there and willing to toe that line,” he continues. “The moment you decide you’re ready to compromise is the moment I stop fighting for you.”

He tosses a wad of cash on the table and stands up. He pauses beside her, contemplating the top of her head, the white of her fingers as she grips the mug, and the stack of papers in front of her. Rapping the table lightly with his knuckles, he mutters, “You take care of yourself, m’am.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter includes references to the 2004 movie "The Punisher" starring Thomas Jane, as well as characters from the Punisher comics arc "In the Beginning."
> 
> After much back-and-forth with my husband involving a multitude of dark, often blurry screenshots of the scene where Karen pointed the gun at Frank, we have come to the uneasy conclusion that Karen's much-lauded .380 was, in fact, a prop gun. (Well, they're ALL prop guns, but this particular prop gun is not based on a real gun.) So during the course of my research, I landed on the gun that looks the most similar to the one Karen used, and that was the Bersa Thunder. 
> 
> If anyone knows the actual model of Karen's gun, please let me know!


	3. chapter three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You said he never lies to you. I think he just chooses which truths to tell,” Matt says savagely, like he's ripping off a bandage.
> 
> Her voice is barely a whisper. “Why are you telling me this?”
> 
> “Because you think you’re friends with a misguided saint, Karen, but he’s deranged. I’ve stood on every rooftop in this neighborhood trying to reason with him, and he can’t be swayed. He’s fashioned himself as judge, jury, and executioner, and his bloodlust is only growing in proportion to his activities. You can’t reason with him, you can’t change his mind, and as soon as you put yourself between him and his mission, he will gun you down.”

“And then… poof? He was gone? Just like that?”

Karen presses her fingertips to her temples, massaging in a circular motion in a futile attempt to alleviate the headache she’s had for the past, oh, six or seven months. Across from her, perched on the arm of Ben’s couch, Ellison’s arms are crossed and he’s wearing what she’s started referring to as his “investigative expression,” like he doesn’t believe her.

“It’s the third time he’s walked out on me,” she says in a hollow voice. “Call me crazy, but I think I’ll take the hint.”

“So the story is dead --?”

“What story?” she asks in frustration, her hands slamming down on her desktop. “I have breadcrumbs, I have suspicions, I have eyewitnesses from people in Florida who have no idea what Frank Castle meant to --”

She pulls up short, inhaling sharply. Ellison gives her that fatherly look, one of understanding and affection mixed with deep fear and wariness.

“Meant to the Kitchen,” she finishes lamely. “What he meant to the people here.”

“Isn’t it your job, as a reporter, to connect those dots for people?”

She shakes her head. “He told me Frank Castle is dead. It’s just… just the Punisher now.”

“And you believe that?”

She thinks back to their conversation at her kitchen table, of the way his eyes went dead when he told her about burning down his family home. She’d known all about it, of course; as soon as the news had hit the wires, she knew it must’ve been Frank, must’ve been symbolic in some way. It’s why she never, ever expected him to turn up at her doorstep again.

Then she thinks of the way he got animated when she brought up their last meeting, how his anger seemed to be simmering right at the surface, and yet he didn’t exhibit any violence until he kicked that box in the midst of prowling around her apartment.

She thinks of that hospital bed, the courtroom, those prison visitation rooms where he was handcuffed to tables and rails. She knows now that he could’ve easily broken those bonds, that they were only decoration, adornments to make the guards and jurors feel safe. On some level, Karen knew all along that his submission, his docility, was all an act, and that his biggest act was for her benefit.

She saw it on display at her kitchen table, when he rested his palms on the surface as if he were wearing cuffs again. He forced himself to be still, even as she watched that trigger finger jump. He was coiled, he was poised, he was dying to tackle her and knock that gun away, but he never gave in.

“I don’t know,” she says finally. “But I do know I’m done writing about Frank Castle. There’s plenty of fraud and corruption to report in this city, and it’s not like all of it leads back to him.”

Ellison, for all of his interfering and his tendency to be overbearing, has been in this business a long time. Judging by the disbelieving expression he gives her as he stands to leave her office, this Frank Castle story is far from over.

 

* * *

 

It’s easy to move on with her life, though, once Frank Castle decides not to be part of it.

He disappears so completely that she might believe he was a figment of her imagination if she didn’t have those files, that fear, and the smear of blood that just won’t come out of her kitchen tabletop.

She tries to track him down for two weeks, going on rooftops, returning to the diner, visiting the remains of the house, even turning up at the cemetery one time, before abruptly getting back into the taxi. That was the day she gave up on Frank Castle; if he didn’t want her to find him, she wasn’t going to waste her life looking for him.

She’s making a name for herself as an up-and-coming investigative reporter, under the careful guidance and protection of Ellison. She exposes two high-level cases of corruption in the private sector over the next five months, ensuring that a few CEOs and their lawyers won’t be home for Christmas, and a couple of her smaller stories about low-level embezzlement and fraud are even entered as evidence into court cases.

She also makes friends. Aside from Foggy, whom she occasionally meets for drinks at Josie’s, she’s forged some friendships with a couple of colleagues as well as one or two of her former sources. She even goes on a couple of dates, though they don’t match the intensity of her previous conquests. She tries not to think of those -- of multi-colored chili peppers on the ceiling or two white mugs full of coffee in a darkened diner -- too often.

Her life is virtually unrecognizable from the solitary one she’d led twelve months ago, yet on the edges of her reality, in the shadows and skirting through the night, are the dead bodies. The count builds until one night in late October, she hears a news report that the total is now over 100.

One hundred people killed by the Punisher. And quite a few of them are Russians.

(Occasionally, Ellison would sidle into her office with a newspaper bearing a Punisher-related headline. “Still no story, hm?” he'd ask every time, and every time, she would shake her head. He stopped asking about two months ago.)

He does it the next morning, though, while Karen’s still unwinding her scarf from her neck and balancing her to-go coffee precariously on a stack of folders. He tosses the morning’s _Post_ , bearing the headline “Hit at Pier 81 Brings Punisher Death Total to 102,” onto her desk and crosses his arms expectantly.

“Who were they?” she asks passively, draping her scarf over her coat on the coat rack behind her desk.

“Chechens. Yeah, I didn’t know they still existed as a crime syndicate, either,” Ellison says conversationally. “Technically, they don’t, anymore.”

“It’s an offshoot of the Russian mob,” she says offhand, dropping into her chair and picking up the paper. “The Chechens do most of their drug running through Brooklyn. Or they did, anyway.”

“And you know this, how?” Ellison asks, then puts up his hands. “Right, right, you just know how his mind works.”

“I know how these gangs work,” she says, undeterred. “And if one more shitty drug runner is taken down, it’s no skin off my nose.”

“Any idea who he’ll hit next?”

Karen purses her lips. “I’m not clairvoyant. I never know what he’s doing until after it’s done. I’m just saying, it makes sense.”

“One hundred people is no small number,” Ellison says gravely. “Maybe they were all bad guys, but unless he has a new vendetta, this is beyond his crusade to avenge his family. You still think he’s on the side of the angels?”

She’s not sure she ever would’ve put Frank on the side of the angels, but as for a possible new vendetta…

“Well, he’s definitely not on the side of the Devil,” Karen says archly, and it earns a rare chuckle from her editor, even if it gives her an idea.

 

* * *

 

Matt’s still in mourning.

He’d finally told her everything about the woman -- Elektra -- and Karen had listened long enough to get the whole story before she decided to take a break from Matt Murdock for a while. She hasn’t seen him in months, only getting the occasional update of “Yeah, he’s fine, still fighting crime at night” from Foggy. Still, it feels like no time has passed at all when Karen knocks on his door that evening.

What is it with the men in her life always showing up with bruises and cuts? 

“You look horrible,” she says by way of greeting when Matt swings the door open, and he laughs, that unassuming and innocent laugh she’d fallen for all those months ago. It still evokes those same emotions -- that swell of affection, that feeling of safety, that sense of comfort -- but it’s detached now, like those things never belonged to her in the first place.

“You sound good,” he says, pulling her in for a hug, which she accepts awkwardly. Matt’s always been tactile, he has to be in order to cope with his blindness, but it still surprises Karen to have that contact at all. She finds herself thinking of Frank as she pulls away, of how the only time he ever touched her was to shield her from bullets.

She pushes those thoughts away, focusing on the man in front of her. He’s still cloaked in sadness, his shoulders sagging a bit under the cross he’s bearing, and he’s definitely looking worse for wear, though not as pulverized as Frank had been the night he’d turned up at her doorstep.

As soon as they’re settled on his couch, Matt politely asks, “To what do I owe this visit?”

“Did you hear the news about Frank today?”

His expression changes. “You’re here about Frank?”

Did that hurt him? Is he upset? Or is he hearing something in her heartbeat, in her pulse? Can Matt Murdock read minds?

“We had a… we had a bad parting,” she explains haltingly.

“The same can be said for you and me,” Matt points out quietly.

“You lied to me for the better part of eighteen months,” Karen replies coolly. “Frank never did that. He was always completely honest with me.”

“Completely?” Matt laughs, and Karen bites her lip to keep from lashing out at him in irritation.

She takes a couple of deep breaths, then says, “I just want to find him. To talk to him one more time.”

“Is this for a story?”

He asks it with the perfect amount of innocent curiosity, and she almost buys it -- she almost thinks Matt truly believes that Karen’s just after a story. But she’d heard that tone many times during her days as a legal secretary, and that tone turned out to be a lie, the cover he used when he was formulating a Daredevil plan, when there were moving parts he didn’t want her to see or know.

“Foggy said you can hear when I lie to you,” she says after a beat. “So, should I bother lying?”

He presses his lips together, his eyes turning sad. “He’s dangerous, Karen.”

“Not to me.”

“And the fact that I sense no deception in that statement scares the shit out of me.”

“Well that’s not your concern anymore, is it?” she snaps.

He leans away from her, like the physical space might help, but then he stands up and walks to the kitchen for a glass of water. She watches him warily, wondering if he’s going to play his trump card of “for your own protection, Karen,” and already formulating the litany of arguments she’s going to throw at him for even suggesting --

“What if I told you that he hasn’t told you everything?”

She wasn’t expecting that. He’s leaning against the counter, his hand loose around the water glass, his head cocked slightly to listen to her heart rate, presumably. It doesn’t matter, even someone without enhanced senses would be able to pick up the jackhammering in her chest. “What do you mean?”

“Did he tell you about the stalker?”

She blinks. “The stalker…?”

“The one he shot in the head outside of Metro General.”

She remembers the guy. It was a Frank Castle special, his very first dropped body to announce his return to the city. She’d known it right away, but she’d assumed he was just a low-level Irish gang member. “What about him?”

“He killed him for stalking you. There was a bounty on your head by the Irish, and Frank sussed it out and killed the guy.”

She suddenly feels sick. 

“Before he left, the first time, he killed two other men who had played a part in abducting you that night on the bus. In fact, I have three other cases where I suspect that the only reason Frank Castle was killing was for you, and if I were to have a guess, I’d say his latest spree has something to do with you, too.”

She can’t breathe. She puts her elbows on her knees, resting her forehead in her hands as she focuses on taking deep breaths. _Your right choice and my right choice are never gonna be the same choice._

“You said he never lies to you. I think he just chooses which truths to tell,” Matt says savagely, like he's ripping off a bandage. 

Her voice is barely a whisper. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because you think you’re friends with a misguided saint, Karen, but he’s deranged. I’ve stood on every rooftop in this neighborhood trying to reason with him, and he can’t be swayed. He’s fashioned himself as judge, jury, and executioner, and his bloodlust is only growing in proportion to his activities. You can’t reason with him, you can’t change his mind, and as soon as you put yourself between him and his mission, he will gun you down.”

She takes another deep breath, then lifts her head abruptly, her brain jamming on his last words. Before she can even process what he meant, she hears herself saying, “You’re wrong.”

He cocks his head.

“He’ll gun down everyone else -- maybe even you -- but he won’t kill me. He’s had every opportunity, and he hasn’t done it.”

Matt shakes his head, his lip curling. “That’s naive --”

“Maybe, but I’m willing to believe in that one shred of goodness in Frank rather than writing him off completely,” she says fiercely, standing up, her fists clenched at her sides. “You can wallow here in your self-pity and feel bad that you couldn’t save her life, that you can’t change his mind, but at the end of the day, that’s on you, Matt. You chose this life. You have to accept the consequences of being a vigilante, and accept your role in creating the monster you call The Punisher.”

She’s standing right in front of him now, her whole body shaking with anger and grief, and he’s standing there with his hand on his hip like some kind of disapproving authority figure. After a moment of contemplation, he sets down his glass and rests his fists on the counter, like he’s about to make a decision he will regret.

“I haven’t seen him in at least two months,” he starts cautiously.

“I haven’t seen him in five,” Karen says hopefully. “Any lead is a good lead.”

“I tracked him once, to a tenement on 46th, between 9th and 10th. Fourth floor, southwest corner. This was months ago,” he adds emphatically. “And I heard an arsenal. Guns, ammo, kevlar, armor, bomb-making kits, the whole shebang.”

She nods once. “Thank you.”

“He’s still a murderer, Karen.”

She doesn’t say what she’s thinking, but maybe Matt senses it, because his expression changes to one of sympathy as soon as the words pop into her brain: _So am I._

 

* * *

 

It’s a nicer tenement, much nicer than the one Elena Cardenas had called home, but still a tenement nonetheless. It’s six stories tall with a red brick facade, and there’s nothing about it that would indicate that the Punisher lives there.

Karen pauses at the mailboxes in the entryway, scanning the names until her eyes land on one that looks newer: Castiglione. 4D.

She makes her way to the fourth floor and takes a trembling breath before knocking on the door of 4D. She waits a moment and listens, but there’s not so much as a rustle inside, so she carefully picks the lock and lets herself into the apartment.

(Maybe she’d ordered a lock-picking kit during the course of her investigations for the last five months. Maybe she practiced it every night for six weeks until she could do it with her eyes closed. Maybe she did it in the hopes of using it in this exact scenario.)

It’s definitely Frank’s place.

She’d always pictured him living in squalor somewhere. Maybe in an abandoned factory with a mattress on the floor and a hot plate on the windowsill. Or possibly in a dank, wet basement with thundering pipes and rats as neighbors. He had the air of a nomad, a man who doesn’t put down roots or pay rent or keep a gun safe, so it was easy to imagine a scenario where his living quarters would serve simply as a place to stash his weapons.

But this place is oddly comforting. It’s a studio, barely big enough to hold his three pieces of furniture and his arsenal. It has a sense of military utilitarianism, and that’s besides all the guns and ammo. There are no personal effects, no framed photos or notes on the fridge, no decorative pieces or a lighthearted painting to cheer him up. A blue barmop is hanging on the handle of his oven door, white towels are hanging on the rack in the bathroom, and his bedsheets are light gray and covered in a secondhand quilt bearing the stars and stripes -- possibly the only hint of sentimentality in the whole place. The only other personal touch is a map of Manhattan pinned to the far wall, but that’s clearly for strategic purposes, as it’s stuck with multi-colored pins and pictures of various mobsters and bosses.

She stands in the center of the room, turning in a slow circle in disbelief.

This is where he conducts his business. This is where the killing originates. This is where Frank Castle -- no, The Punisher -- will sit and plan his next massacre.

She drops down heavily into his desk chair, letting her reporter side take over as she rifles through the papers strewn across it. Of course the Chechen stuff is on top, with a couple of printed maps of lower 9th street circled and highlighted along with photos of the bosses. There’s a folder bearing an older case where he hit a small German gang, and another thick folder with information pertaining to the possible resurgence of the Russians. 

Then there’s the thick Wilson Fisk folder, and she gasps when she encounters a photo of Wesley, his former right-hand man. Frank had drawn an X over Wesley’s face, with the notation “killed by Owlsley.”

She slams the folder shut, sickened, and her eyes land on a green folder that’s tucked away at the top corner of the desk. It looks empty, but a corner of a photo is poking out, so she pulls the folder toward her and opens it gingerly.

It’s a printed version of the photo Frank had showed her on that phone months ago. The resolution is grainy, but it’s clear that they’re smiling at each other across the diner table -- a detail that hadn’t been easy to catch on the tiny phone screen when he’d originally showed it to her.

She doesn’t remember smiling at Frank Castle that night, she doesn’t remember him smiling at her, and she certainly doesn’t remember this level of deep affection that seems evident in this long-distance, grainy picture, but it’s all there. No wonder it had spooked him. No wonder he’d turned up at her doorstep.

The folder is empty except for this picture, it’s not even labeled -- no date, no location, not even her name. There are no notes or annotations, just a picture in a folder in an apartment that had seemed, until this moment, to be completely devoid of personal effects.

“What the hell are you doing here?”

She gasps and leaps out of the chair as if she’d been burnt, and for the first time ever, she’s not even a little bit relieved to see Frank Castle; she’s terrified.

He’s towering over her, and in the back of her mind, she thinks it’s the first time he’s stood up all the way in her presence, in an attempt to intimidate her. His black eyes are sparking with fury, and his hands are clenched into fists almost into a fighter’s stance. She supposes she should count herself lucky that she’s not staring down the barrel of a semi-automatic gun, and she feels stupid for ever telling Matt that Frank would never kill her.

He’s looking particularly murderous at the moment.

And Karen is feeling ridiculous that she hadn’t planned for this eventuality, that she doesn’t have a glib comment or scathing remark to hurl at him in order to break this awkward moment. She casts around for something, anything, and her eyes land on the photo still sitting on top of the stack on his desk, the incriminating photo of a web of lies they’ve been telling themselves and each other without ever saying the words out loud.

“It’s not exactly how I remember that day,” she says with a nervous laugh.

He’s arrested for a moment, just staring at her with a deep, inscrutable scowl. His eyes follow her gesture to the photo, and then his face changes to a different kind of anger… a colder kind of rage.

“I mean, looking back,” she continues in a stammering voice, wringing her hands, “I remember being nervous. I remember a lecture. And then gunshots. And blood. And police.”

“And me, telling you to stay far away from me,” he says, his jaw clenching as he takes a step toward her, coming right into her personal space.

He could break her in half, she’s always appreciated that he could do that. She wouldn’t even be able to put up a fight like the Irish did, or the bikers, or the two guys who came into the diner that night. Even Matt had come off worse in most of his encounters with Frank, and what did Karen have compared to Matt? Her investigative skills? Her mace?

This was a bad idea. Standing here staring up into his lethal features, she realizes that there’s no talking to this man, that Matt was right, that he’s beyond reason --

“So why don’t you ever listen to me?” he mutters furiously, his breath warm on her face as he breaks her reverie.

She glances back down at the files, at the photos of the Chechen men still visible on the edge of the desk. “That was you?”

He puffs up his chest and shakes his head, annoyed, as he finally moves away from her without answering, pulling off his coat and tossing it onto the couch.

“Frank.”

He moves to his kitchenette -- it’s no more than a stove, a sink, a small fridge, and two square feet of counter space -- and begins setting up his coffee maker to brew a fresh pot. He continues to ignore her as she stands there and watches him pour grounds into a filter, fill up the reservoir, and set the machine to start brewing. Soon enough, the small apartment is filled with the aroma of coffee.

“If I had found anyone else in this apartment, I’d be disposing of the body right now,” he finally growls, crossing the apartment to drop onto the edge of his bed.

“And I’m the exception because…?” she starts, feeling like she’s playing with fire, but he just levels her with another annoyed look as he starts unlacing his boots. “Okay. Well I hadn’t seen you for a while --”

“That was on purpose.”

“And you hit a milestone last night,” she cuts across him as he pulls off one boot. “You told me, last time we talked, that I should stay away, but I know why you’re killing all these men, Frank. It has to stop.”

“I’ll decide when it stops.”

“You’re crossing the line into being an assassin. To being a murderer.”

The other boot comes off, and then her heart jumps into her throat when he raises his head and flashes her that crooked, self-deprecating smile. “It’s about time you figured that out, m’am.”

She recovers quickly, rolling her eyes. “Matt told me about the stalker.”

He squints at her, feigning innocence as he shoves his boots over to the wall and stands back up. “Dunno what you mean.”

“The guy outside the hospital, about a year ago? He told me about that, and about the list of other deaths he only has suspicions about.”

“Did he say it during a girls night?” he asks sarcastically as he passes her. “Was it part of the hair-braiding portion, or during the manicures?”

“Funny,” Karen snaps, angry at his implication. “You told me to stay away, but you left a pile of dead bodies in my wake.”

“Better their bodies than yours,” Frank answers swiftly, pulling a mug out of the sink and inspecting it. Apparently it doesn’t pass muster, as he turns on the water and begins scrubbing it out with a sponge. “You just came over here to yell at me for saving your life?”

“A hundred and two people, Frank.”

He turns his back to her, spreading out the barmop and placing the mug upside-down on it. “They needed to die.”

“And how many more are on your list? How many more until your so-called mission is over?”

“I’m sorry,” he snaps, rounding on her. “I don’t remember anyone appointing you as my assassin’s handler. I don’t answer to you.”

“That’s my point, you don’t answer to anybody!”

He laughs. It’s a mirthless chuckle, an alien sound utterly devoid of human empathy or emotion. If Karen closed her eyes and concentrated, she could imagine Frank laughing that same way in prison, surrounded by murderers and criminals, joining in their shared lack of morals and stigmas.

Then he pulls out the coffee pot and fills the freshly-washed mug to the brim. He replaces the pot and turns, thrusting the coffee out at the full length of his reach, holding it out to her with the first expression of trepidation she’s seen since he walked in.

She takes the mug, more out of surprise than anything else, and he holds her gaze for a couple more seconds than is strictly necessary, his expression still nakedly disconcerted before he turns and pours himself a cup in an unwashed mug.

The whole thing lasts maybe ten seconds, and on the surface, for Christ’s sake, all he did was hand her a cup of coffee.

But she's missed that small slice of consideration, the rare show of humanity that Frank always seems to accidentally display for her, without even thinking about it. He’d just done it again, taking even himself by surprise, and it throws a wet blanket over their heated argument, sobering both of them to the reality of their impossible situation.

She sits down in his desk chair, sipping the coffee gratefully, and it’s not the only thing warming her insides as she watches Frank lean against the counter, his profile still as brutal as ever.

His right eye was blackened, she’d noticed it right away. He also had two deep cuts high on his left cheekbone, covered with two small butterfly bandages, and a big round shiner on the bottom of his left jaw, like he’d been on the business end of an uppercut. In all, he looks a lot less beaten up than usual, but still enough to make her wonder what sorts of fights he’s still picking with people.

He’s put on muscle, too. He’s at least fifteen pounds heavier than the last time she’d seen him, carrying it mostly in his arms and shoulders. His hair is still cut in that military fade that is somehow also in style right now, and his nose is just as crooked and busted as ever.

She takes in all these observations, and she gets the sense that he’s letting her study him. He’d done the same thing in the hospital, laying in that bed passively as she’d looked him over and assessed his character. Now, however, he’s just humoring her, because she knows his character; everything else is just superficial.

“How did you get in here?” he asks quietly, his eyes trained straight ahead.

“Picked the lock.”

He curses under his breath, and she feels a swell of pride that is quickly quashed by the realization that she just felt validated by a mass murderer. _Oh, Karen._

“How did you find me?”

She hesitates at this question, but he’s waiting, and they don’t lie to each other. “Matt tracked you here a while ago.”

He smiles again, a small sign of affection, but a sign nonetheless. “Yeah, I guess I’m just surprised you didn’t knock down my door the day I moved in.”

“I saw the name,” she adds with a little smile. “Castiglione. An alias?”

“Of sorts,” he says vaguely, sipping his coffee. “Moved in about four months ago. Got tired of eating beans out of a can and showering at the Y.”

“Yeah, I assumed you were in some basement or warehouse,” she says with a laugh. “I was pleasantly surprised. I wouldn’t have suspected it was yours except…” she gestures at the table laden with guns and ammunition.

“Guess I’ll have to find another place,” he says quietly, taking another sip of coffee.

“Frank…”

“You aren’t gonna change my mind, lady,” he says with a hint of aggression, turning his head so that his chin is tipped toward her. “Showing up at my doorstep isn’t going to sway my views.”

“I’m just trying to help you see that there’s more to the world than killing the bad guys --”

“No,” he says sharply. “There isn’t. There’s only this mission.”

Tears sting her eyes as she glares at him in disbelief. “Only this? Nothing else?” she asks emphatically, loaded with innuendo, with feeling, with the same trepidation he must have felt when he handed her that cup so innocently.

“Maybe it’s time we stopped having these goddamn circular conversations and just accept the truth,” he growls, turning to stare straight ahead once more. “That maybe this little friendship here has run its course.”

They’re all so hell-bent on saving her from herself, on protecting her from unnamed dangers and risks, on keeping her insulated from the world. Ellison, Matt, Frank, even Foggy with his vague warnings about “bad men in this town, Karen,” all of it based in some twisted, ingrained form of misogyny meant to keep the innocent lady from getting her hands wet with someone else’s blood in someone else’s war.

Well she’s been covered in that blood twice now, in the course of this same war, the war against Hell’s Kitchen itself. She doesn’t have supersonic hearing or super serum, she was never exposed to gamma radiation and she doesn’t have access to a metal suit. She’s not a trained assassin or a war vet with years of strategizing under her belt, but she is a human being who is perfectly capable of deciding what sort of life she wants to lead, and sitting on the sidelines is becoming monotonous.

She helped to take down Union Allied and Wilson Fisk. She helped down-on-their-luck clients who wandered into Nelson and Murdock with only a few coins in their pockets. She helped to expose corruption in the district attorney’s office, then went on to uncover two more corruption cases in the private sector. She’s Karen _fucking_ Page, and she’s sick to death of these men acting like she doesn’t have a say over her own life.

“Do you ever think about us, Frank?” she asks softly, her fingertips tracing a nonexistent pattern on the desktop. His breathing changes slightly after she asks the question, it’s shallower and slightly faster now. “I do. I think about us a lot. I usually think we’re two ships in the night. We pass, we flash our lights at each other, and we regard each other with mutual respect.”

He’s not looking at her when she raises her eyes. He’s watching her hand on the desktop from the corner of his eye.

“We ships, we meet sometimes, we know what we have in common. We know each other’s flaws and strengths. We know we could complement each other, if one of us was willing to change. We know that we could destroy each other, if neither of us is willing to change.”

He swallows, it’s the most human thing she’s seen him do, and she watches his Adam’s apple bob in his throat as he continues to give her his profile, the scratches on his cheekbone still prominent in the light of the lamp.

“We don’t know each other, not really. I don’t know your combat history. I don’t know your mother’s name, or if you had siblings. I don’t know where you grew up.” She inhales another jagged breath. “You don’t know that my brother died when he was sixteen. You don’t know that I was in jail for one night for a murder I didn’t commit. You don’t know that a prison guard tried to kill me in an attempt to stage my suicide, and that I scratched out one of his eyes.”

He’s looking at her now, he hasn’t turned his face but his black eyes are on her, searching her expression with mingled horror and intrigue.

“We know enough about each other to be drawn in, but not enough to risk crashing into each other. So we flash our lights and pass each other in the night, carried by our respective currents, trying to stay on our given paths. Until we encounter each other again.”

He’s blinking rapidly, holding back tears, his jaw clenching and unclenching as he looks everywhere else in the room except at her. “You don’t know what you’re saying,” he mutters threateningly.

She places her empty mug on his desk, picking up the picture of them at the diner and moving to stand in front of him. She holds up the photo and asks, “Is this how you remember that night?”

He swallows again, his eyes trained on her face, like he can’t bear to look at the photo. “No.”

“What do you remember?”

His expression is naked again, like he’s feeling a mixture of emotions so strong that a single one can’t fight its way to the surface. His eyes are roaming over her face, like he’s not really seeing her as he struggles to recall: “You were scared. You jumped. And I talked, just to keep you distracted.”

“From the hit men that you were luring there --”

“From your own fear,” he says gruffly. “I needed you there, but you were still recovering from an assassination attempt.”

She shivers, lowering the photo. “You felt something.”

“Yeah,” he says gutturally, his eyes still transfixed on hers. “So?”

“So do we pass in the night? Or do we crash?” she whispers.

His jaw is clenching again, she watches it in fascination. He hasn’t budged. He’s maintained his respectful distance, his empty coffee mug hanging loosely in his hand. He’s drawn the boundaries based on what he thinks she wants, but at some point, she has to consider that she has the capacity to hurt him just as badly as he can hurt her.

“If you want me to leave, I’ll leave,” she says softly.

“I want you to leave,” he answers her immediately, like he’s responding to his drill instructor. His eyes, full of pain and sorrow, tell a different story, but one with the same ending.

He can’t ask her to stay. She doesn’t know why, she just recognizes the longing and regret as she stares into his eyes -- that any other time, any other place, any other two people, and he would’ve asked her to stay. But he can’t.

She places the photo back on the counter beside him, leaning in just enough to infringe on his personal space, to sense his posture straightening, to hear the sharp intake of breath… Then she falls back on her heels and gives him a sad smile.

“Good bye, Frank.”

She doesn’t let herself cry until she’s home safely behind her front door with four locks.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My resident expert on New York City geography hasn't finished watching Daredevil yet, so I had to fly by the seat of my pants when placing things in Hell's Kitchen. Anything that seems out of place or amiss is definitely Beth's fault.


	4. chapter four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Now, months later, the best parts of her stay with him, safely tucked away in another borough: the research, the diligence, the passion, and that picture of them at the diner. He tells himself that’s all he needs, and this distance is good for him -- for both of them.
> 
> Frank doesn’t lie to her, but he’s gotten pretty goddamn good at lying to himself.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for depictions of violence and references to injury and blood in this chapter.

Inhale.

Exhale.

_One batch, two batch._

Inhale.

Exhale.

_Penny and dime._

He doesn’t hear it coming.

 

* * *

 

_They say you don’t hear the bullet that gets ya. Always thought that sounded like a bunch of bullshit to me. What about you, Red? When I cracked off your forehead the other night, you hear that?_

 

* * *

 

The bullet grazes his left arm, a through-and-through that he'll later determine is just a nasty flesh wound. It's a good thing they were shit shots.

It's enough, though. It disorients him just long enough for them to sneak up. He feels the blow to his head, hears his AK-47 clatter to the ground, and then the wind is knocked out of him and he’s just trying to get air to his lungs.

He swings out of instinct, bellowing something unintelligible, and catches the back of someone’s legs. The body hits the ground hard, just enough time for Frank to taste oxygen again, and then it’s an unfair fight as he unholsters his Colt Mustang and sticks it on the neck of the little Russian shitstain that had caught him unawares. The shot echoes through the night as blood splatters everywhere, and Frank knows only a roar of hostility before four other men converge on him.

One gets his switchblade to the eye; Frank leaves it there as the man howls in some kind of non-Russian language, maybe Bulgarian? Meanwhile he spins around and catches the arm of a man wielding, of all things, a machete, because this fucker brought a knife to a gunfight. That guy gets two rounds of .380’s to the stomach, and he falls to the ground as Frank seizes his wrist and swings the machete upward, catching the third guy across the throat with the blade. Now drenched in blood, Frank narrowly misses two shots from the fourth guy, who looks less at ease with an assault rifle than you would expect of your average Russian.

Frank’s focused too closely on the rifle and misses how close the switchblade-to-the-eye guy is to him, earning him a blow to the head. He falls to the ground and expects it to be the end as he takes two more punches to the face and one to the sternum, but the fourth guy doesn’t have the stones to point the gun between Frank’s eyes and pull the trigger.

Frank grins at the man’s moment of weakness, a moment that will ultimately cause the Ruskie douchebag his life. His fingers grope toward his forgotten AK. After that, it’s over in a matter of seconds: two quick pops to the forehead, and one center-mass kill shot to the guy with the knife in his eye.

 

* * *

 

His name is Alexander Baranovich Formichenko, and he’s a salty little fucker, full of vitriol and deep-seated patriotism for the Mother Country.

At any other stage in life, Frank might’ve hated him on the spot. He was the sort of blinded ideologue who would throw punches first and ask questions... well, he probably didn’t even ask questions. He was the sort of man who sold his soul for his country and had nothing to show for it when that wall came down. Frank has no doubt that in an earlier decade, he would've killed the scrappy little guy himself.

But hard, vodka-soaked years had bent the spine of Alexander Baranovich Formichenko, had twisted his knuckles, grayed his hair, and left his skin wrinkled and ashen. His days are now spent bellied up to a bar in Brighton Beach, lamenting the loss of quality Soviet vodka as he decries the various failings of men named Medvedev and Putin.

Frank, having long since taken up residence in Bensonhurst, has been frequenting that bar, hoping for intel on the Russian mob. The last few months in Hell's Kitchen had yielded nothing in his search, and using the excuse to get out of the borough for a while, he chose to relocate to Brooklyn, where he hoped to turn up more information on the men who had been tailing him all those months ago.

So far, the bar was proving disappointing, as most of the patrons are washed-up relics of the Cold War or shitty little upstarts whose parents made it to America before they’d had the displeasure of experiencing post-war Russia.

Them, and Alexander Baranovich Formichenko, whose spiteful words had long since ruffled the feathers of the proud American-born Russians that were sitting at the bar that afternoon.

“This vodka is piss,” he declared in his heavily accented English, smashing the glass against the bar without cracking it. “And Russia is gone to shit. Nothing left. Once greatest peoples of the world, now we are fucked.”

The kids -- Frank called them kids, though the oldest looked to be in his mid-twenties -- pushed away from the bar, their hands subconsciously going to their pieces. Frank had been hearing the rant all week, ever since the bar had run out of his favorite vodka, a clear bottle with a red label and a white star. Communism had fucked a lot of people, but it had produced some top quality vodka.

“Watch what you say,” the barman warned in a much less accented undertone, his eyes darting to the younger men down the bar. “Talk like that in this neighborhood is dangerous.”

“I am Alexander Baranovich Formichenko, I fear nothing and no one. I was a soldier in the war!” He slammed the glass down again, this time succeeding in smashing it, then stood up. “Piss on you! Piss on all of you!”

Frank watched as he shuffled out of the bar, then watched the men exchange meaningful glances as they followed him.

Maybe this bar was a dead end for intel, maybe not. Maybe he was about to make it a dead end.

He drained his club soda and strode up to the bar, flagging down the barman. He was just about to pour another drink when Frank grabbed his blond ponytail and smashed the man’s face into the bar, jamming the barrel of his Colt into the man’s temple.

“Alexander Baranovich Formichenko is protected.”

He didn’t wait for an answer, but it came nonetheless as he left the bar: “Okay.”

Five minutes later, Alexander Baranovich Formichenko was still shuffling down 3rd Street, muttering about the old ways, none the wiser about the three men who were dying of stab wounds in the alley behind him.

Maybe Frank’s got kind of a thing about respect for the elderly.

 

* * *

  

He’d rattled their cage, that’s for sure. The barman might've talked, maybe under duress, but all the same, they must know the Punisher is active in their neighborhood. The fact that they tried to take him means he’s onto something.

He lays on the ground for a minute, assessing the damage to his body. His left eye is already swelling shut, he thinks he might have broken his left pinkie finger, and there are two cuts on his right forearm, probably from that goddamn machete. He thinks his inner thigh might be deeply bruised, too, but he won’t know for sure until he drops trou. This is all in addition to his bullet wound, which is starting to ache. Luckily his head clears quickly and he’s able to sit up without any dizziness, so he sets to work quickly.

Five minutes later, he’s armed with three wallets and all of the ammo from their piece of shit guns. No wonder they’d brought out the knife.

He’d missed the opportunity to take the kill shot on his target, a known associate of the three men he’d killed in the alley, but maybe that had been part of their plan. Either way, it wasn’t perfect, as the Russians had sent four untrained and mostly unarmed men against the most formidable foe the city has ever seen.

His Bensonhurst safe house is nothing like the one he’d abandoned in Hell’s Kitchen. For starters, he doesn’t pay rent on it, since he’s living in the basement of a condemned building. He’s not the only inhabitant of the building, as the upper floors function as a heroin den. The junkies keep to themselves; when they’re not busy shooting up, they’re generally passed out or too stoned to notice Frank’s comings and goings.

Obliterating the thriving heroin trade in Brooklyn seems like a worthy cause to Frank, but one that should wait for another day.

The basement had been more bearable when Frank had first arrived four months ago, in the dead of winter. Now that it’s mid-spring, the humidity and lack of air circulation is punishing. If he wasn’t sleeping much before, he’s definitely not sleeping now.

He misses Manhattan, sometimes. If he’s honest with himself, he doesn’t like being so far away from her, but it’s that exact sentiment that keeps him rooted in Brooklyn. And it has its advantages: Manhattan was a microscope, people know to look for the Punisher on rooflines or in alleys in Manhattan, but Brooklyn is insulated. He’s been here for four months with no attempts on his life until tonight.

Glancing around the dark, dreary basement, he thinks maybe it’s time to return to Hell’s Kitchen, but not before he finishes his business here.

He stitches himself up first, cleaning the wound and bandaging it as best as he can with one hand. Then he searches the wallets, pocketing the cash and examining the IDs as he discards everything else.

One of the men, a Yevgeny Oletchko, has an address listed in Gravesend; Frank figures he’ll start there.

 

* * *

  

Frank hadn’t developed a proper appreciation for diligent research until he’d seen it in action.

Shit, he thought Florida was the New Yorker's equivalent of Mars, that no one would think to connect some mobster’s murder in Tampa to the war that was being waged in Hell’s Kitchen. And maybe she’d had that advantage of knowing Frank’s tells, of knowing exactly what to look for, and having a vested interest in his particular story, but at the end of the day, Frank had to admit that it came down to diligent research. She’d looked for connections and followed them relentlessly, seeing them through until she had the whole story. As upsetting and infuriating as it had felt at the time, Frank had learned a valuable lesson from the ordeal.

So he’d begun researching. He started with Fisk, because that was easy, most of his connections were incarcerated and their stories were public record. He did it mostly for practice and a bit for preparation, as he had no doubt Fisk would be back on the streets in a matter of months, and he wanted to be prepared.

Slowly, over the course of a couple of months, Frank found that with research and his usual surveillance, he was much more effective at ambushes and takedowns. He’d successfully minimized collateral damage most of the time, he was more thorough in his eradication of smaller gangs (which is why the Germans aren’t bothering anyone in the Kitchen these days) and he was more prepared if something didn’t go according to plan. In all, research made him an even better strategist, and he hadn’t exactly been a sham one before now.

Still, he was more than a little embarrassed to find her in his apartment, sitting in the midst of his infantile attempt to be an investigator. It felt like an intense invasion of privacy, like she'd stepped right into his brain and was foraging through all of his careful planning, his darkest thoughts, his most intimate moments. 

Maybe it was because he'd found her holding that picture, the one he'd tried to make himself throw away at least a dozen times, the one that never seemed to make it into the trash bin despite his best efforts.

And he'd told himself to treat her similarly:  _throw her out, get her out of here, it's not safe, she needs to go_. But he hadn't done it. Instead, he breathed her in, that familiar scent now like a flesh memory, a comfort of home. 

She hadn’t belittled his amateur attempts at investigation (not that it was in her nature to do such a thing) and he’d almost wanted to tell her about this small way she’d affected him so deeply.

She knew, though. Maybe not about that particular aspect, but he’d seen it in her eyes when she’d almost leaned in, when he’d almost relented, when it had almost happened. She was in complete control the whole goddamn time, and he’d just been a bystander holding on for dear life. He hadn’t been strong enough to ask her to leave, and she was so fucking strong that she didn’t ask to stay.

Now, months later, the best parts of her stay with him, safely tucked away in another borough: the research, the diligence, the passion, and that picture of them at the diner. He tells himself that’s all he needs, and this distance is good for him -- for both of them.

Frank doesn’t lie to her, but he’s gotten pretty goddamn good at lying to himself.

 

* * *

 

Frank starts tailing Oletchko the next day, picking up the trail at his house in Gravesend and following him to a couple of warehouses in Bushwick. Frank recognizes a couple of his associates from his research, but none of them are high-ranking or important enough to pursue. He considers sitting at one of the warehouses to see what they’re dealing in, but it’s probably drugs or counterfeit money, and ultimately he chooses to stick with Oletchko for a couple of days.

His plan yields a big return on the third day of tailing; Oletchko returns to his house in Gravesend, where a sandy-haired man is waiting on his porch with a cigarette in hand. Frank recognizes the man as soon as he turns his head: it’s Alexei Kurtzkova, whose assassin-for-hire son-in-law, Christopher Dalton, had met his demise in a Hell’s Kitchen alley at Frank’s hand a few months ago.

 

* * *

 

Tailing Kurtzkova seemed simple enough at first. As most things involving the Russian mob, though, things turn out to be more insidious than expected.

It’s a rainy night in Brooklyn, six days into Frank's surveillance, and he’s tracked Kurtzkova to a dilapidated house in Bushwick, just around the corner from one of the warehouses Frank had seen earlier in the week. He’s already soaked through to his socks and thankful that it’s not a chilly evening as he sets up on a roof across the street, choosing to watch their movements through his sniper scope. He marvels at the ridiculous fresh-faced men with ponytails and straight mouths, their impractical jackets failing to conceal the assault rifles strapped to their bodies. They’re not even wearing proper armor, and they’re certainly not scanning the perimeter with any semblance of formal scout training. They’re idiots doing someone else’s bidding, veritable rent-a-cops who think they’re soldiers.

A van rolls up, and Frank watches through the sniper scope as two of the guards saunter down from the porch and roll the back door open. Then his stomach drops when he sees what comes out of the van: not drugs, not women, not associates, but children.

Turns out, assuming the Russians were dealing in drugs was the more optimistic outlook on life.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contained references to the Punisher comic arc "Mother Russia" by Garth Ennis, and a light reference to the 2004 movie "The Punisher" (more specifically, Harry Heck taunting Frank for "bringing a knife to a gunfight").


	5. chapter five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Matt's expression transforms from one of obstinance to one of grim satisfaction. “You want help from Daredevil?”
> 
> Maybe it had been a long time coming. Karen had spent many weeks, months even, praising the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen and thinking of him as a good guy. Matt Murdock had always been a separate entity from the hero who had saved her from multiple tight spots, and when he’d revealed his alter-ego to her, it had been hard for her to merge their identities in her mind.
> 
> She’d fallen out of love with Matt Murdock a long time ago, but she’d never stopped believing in Daredevil.

“You sure you don’t want to go somewhere else?”

Karen arches one eyebrow at the man sitting across from her. “Foggy Nelson, you’ve been a partner at a prestigious law firm for five minutes, and you’re already too good for Josie’s?” 

“Of course not,” he says immediately. “But I haven't seen you in ages, and you deserve to be treated nicely every once in a while.”

She appreciates the sentiment, but she's been on several dates to upscale restaurants in the past few months. The food had cost more than her utility bill, the restaurants had obviously passed the health inspections, and she hadn't hesitated to order martinis with olives in them, but at the end of the day, she missed the closeness and camaraderie she'd always felt when the three of them had gone to Josie's.

“I'm being treated just fine,” she says instead, because she feels like she's been taking these stands with _other people_ of late, and doing it with Foggy just feels wrong.  

“Well, I hope you appreciate my sacrifice,” Foggy says in a mock-superior tone, “but I have a certain image to uphold.”

“Don’t worry, I don’t think Hogarth, Chao, or Benowitz drink here very often,” she says dryly, taking a sip of her scotch.

That launches Foggy into a story about Chao's assistant, and how he'd almost botched the biggest case in the firm's history, and Karen listens patiently, trying not to let her mind wander. 

The truth is, the past month has been hard on her. 

She never went back to Frank's apartment after that day, but she knows he's gone. The city feels just like it did the first time he left, like it's a little less vibrant and a lot more dangerous. Since then, she's grown increasingly obsessed with the photo she'd found on his stack of research. She wishes she'd had the presence of mind to take it with her, even if it's just as evidence of their past friendship, but more and more, she finds herself wanting to investigate the people behind that photo. 

That brings her to tonight, a frigid evening in early March, and her impromptu proposal to have drinks with an old friend. She's always been terrible at concealing her ulterior motives, and even Foggy isn't oblivious enough to miss the signs. 

“You seem like you have something on your mind,” he says after twenty minutes of story-swapping. “Wanna just tell me what's going on?” 

She ducks her head, embarrassed. “You’re a lawyer,” she starts inelegantly, earning a chuckle from Foggy. “What would you do if you had evidence of… one of your clients being followed?”

“Restraining order,” he says immediately, sipping his beer, then he glances at her edgily. “Are you being followed, Karen?”

She’s never talked to Foggy about Frank. He doesn’t know that Frank has saved her life a handful of times, that he's ended the lives of a few criminals that had intended her harm, and that Frank himself was a potential danger to her, though not in the traditional ways. She's always liked Foggy, but somehow she doesn't think he'd understand her if she started talking to him about... pure magnetism. 

“No. Not anymore,” she says. “But a few weeks ago, someone showed me a photo from a year ago, during the -- during the Castle case,” she stammers, because that’s the case that fractured their firm, and any mention of Frank Castle is sure to put Foggy on the defensive. “It looked professional, and I guess I was just wondering --”

“Have you considered that the person who showed you the photo is the one who had ordered the surveillance?” Foggy asks, casually glossing over the oblique reference to his former life.

“It wasn’t them,” she says resolutely. “They were in the photo too, and they're just as alarmed as I am about the whole thing.”

“Then maybe go to some PIs in the city,” Foggy suggests. “If it was professional, that’s where I’d start, it’s their bread and butter. If you find the one who tailed you, maybe you can persuade them to reveal who hired them.”

A private investigator. Who would care so much about Karen that they’d hire a PI?

“Our firm has one on retainer,” Foggy continues, pulling out his phone. “Name’s Jones, she has a practice in midtown, I’d start with her. She’s incredibly unfriendly, though,” he adds as a warning. “Marci’s had to deal with her a couple of times and it wasn’t pretty.”

Karen’s phone dings with the contact information, and she gives Foggy a grateful smile. “Thanks.”

He nods awkwardly, his lips pursing. Karen watches his profile, noting his underlying sadness, and asks, “Are you happy there?”

He half-shrugs. “It’s good money. Steady work. Mostly white-collar criminals for me since I specialize in financing. It’s been nice not dealing with any more Frank Castles.” He shakes his head derisively. “In a way, that guy ruined my life -- our lives. I hope he’s rotting in a shallow ditch somewhere.”

She takes it like a champ, letting him stew in his erroneous characterization of a man he could never begin to understand. 

Or maybe he understands Frank better than Karen ever will. Maybe an objective opinion is no longer possible for her, maybe she sold her soul to the side of the monsters, and she's sitting in sheep's clothing as she sips drinks with Foggy, one of the last good people left in Hell's Kitchen. 

(It feels an awful lot like love.)

 

* * *

 

Karen supposes it's a nice building; she stares up at the vaguely familiar facade as she stands across the street waiting for a break in traffic. Suddenly it hits her: the Schlottman murders. What a fiasco that story had been -- like mind control can really make a person kill their parents. Ridiculous.

Alias Investigations is on the fourth floor at the end of the hall, and Karen pauses for only a fraction of a second before she knocks on the door.

“What?” comes a surly voice from inside.

“I’m looking for a Ms. Jones?” Karen replies awkwardly through the door, and she hears a loud thud from somewhere in the back of the apartment.

“You here to serve her some papers?”

Karen spins around at the sound of another voice; a young man with tall hair and kind eyes has poked his head out of the neighboring apartment to address Karen.

“Um, no --”

“Debt collector?”

Karen huffs out a laugh. “God, no, do I look like a debt collector --?”

“Jess! It’s a client!” he yells at the top of his lungs, then gives Karen the faintest of smiles before slamming his door again. Friendly building.

Karen hears footsteps -- more like stomps, or maybe galomphing -- and then the Alias Investigations door swings open to a tall, black-haired woman who is pulling on a hoodie. “I see you met my secretary,” she says in a carefully cultivated deadpan. “What do you want?”

“I had a few general questions for you, if you don’t mind... ?” Karen says, standing up straighter. “I was hoping we could speak inside?”

After a moment of exaggerated, annoyed contemplation, Jones lets Karen in, slamming the door behind her as she gestures for Karen to sit in front of her desk. She trudges over to the other side and pulls a bottle of Wild Turkey out of the top drawer, unscrewing the cap and taking a long drag before holding the bottle out to Karen in silent offer.

“It’s ten-thirty in the morning,” Karen says, a little surprised. Jones rolls her eyes and puts the bottle back, dropping into her chair.

“What can I do for you?”

Karen sees no advantage to beating around the bush with this woman, so she bluntly asks, “I was wondering if you were ever hired to follow me?”

Jones’ eyes narrow. “Excuse me?”

“A friend of mine brought me a photo he’d found, it was a surveillance photo taken in high-definition from a considerable distance,” Karen says. “It was a while ago, now, but that photo was used by the Russian mob to put out a hit on that friend.”

Jones sits back, crossing her arms and… smiling? “I gotta say, it’s weird to hear someone refer to The Punisher as ‘a friend.’”

Karen goes numb with shock. “I -- what?”

“I was gonna lie to you. Offer up some bullshit about attorney-client privilege, but you run with a pretty dangerous crowd, don't you?” Jones asks archly. Smiling even wider, she sits forward, placing her elbows on her desk. “You looked pretty cozy at that diner, at least up until a point. I would say you’ve probably got it pretty bad for your 'friend,' but who doesn’t like a bad boy, right?”

She's being purposefully antagonistic, that much is obvious, but Karen wonders how effective that is as a business tactic. She takes a deep breath, schooling her anger, and asks, “You were the one who took those photos?”

“No. I acquired them from a piece of shit lawyer who was on his way to Rikers when I intercepted him,” Jones says flatly, leaning back once more. “I didn’t know who he was working for, I just knew the criminal he’d hired to follow certain people around. I had my own orders to keep that criminal in line. It didn’t work out.”

“He’s dead?”

Jones’ face twitches. “He’s incarcerated. For reasons unrelated.”

Karen shakes her head. “Who ordered you to… intercept the lawyer?”

“Let’s just say that the law firm of Hogarth, Chao, and Benowitz was very dedicated to keeping the name of Franklin Nelson clean until he became a named partner.”

“So then how did the photos get into the hands of the Russians?”

Jones shrugs. “No idea. I just collected the goods and moved on with my life.” She rummages in another drawer and pulls out a silver thumb drive, which she tosses onto the desk. “This is everything. I didn’t take it to the people who hired me.”

She says the last part oddly, giving Karen pause as she reaches for the thumb drive. “Why not?”

The other woman shrugs, suddenly looking world-weary. “Seemed like it wasn’t the right thing to do. I think it would’ve put certain wheels in motion.”

Karen suddenly has a lot more questions, ones she’s sure Jones won’t answer, but the reporter side of her is burning with them. _Which lawyer hired you? What made you withhold this information? What sorts of events were you worried about? Why don't you trust them?_

Instead, she pockets the thumb drive and stands up, putting out her hand expectantly. Jones shakes it with a thoughtful look at Karen, then says, “I saw the photos, you know. Of what he did to those two men. And you said he's your friend.”

Karen adjusts the strap of her bag uncomfortably. “He's... complicated.”

That earns her another genuine smile from the PI. “You must be tougher than you look.”

Karen laughs, deciding to take that as a compliment. Jessica arches an eyebrow as she takes another sip of bourbon, watching as Karen heads for the door.

“What was the name of the lawyer who hired him?” Karen asks suddenly, her hand on the doorknob.

Jessica’s eyes narrow slightly, as if she’s deciding whether to play her trump card or keep it close to the vest. After a moment of consideration, she says, “Ben Donovan.”

Karen knows that name. Of course she knows that name. How could she forget the name of the man who is working so tirelessly to get Wilson Fisk released from prison?

 

* * *

 

The photos tell a pretty damning story. No wonder Jessica had looked at Karen so knowingly.

A lot of the photos don’t show Frank’s face; Karen suspects the PI didn’t know who he was until the bloodshed began, but he certainly captured the wide range of Karen’s emotions. She remembers how Frank seemed to look right into her soul, she remembers feeling a deep, aching sorrow when he spoke of his family, and she remembers feeling angry when his little gambit was revealed.

But there are a handful of shots where she looks like a woman in love. How upsetting for the PI, who proceeded to photograph Frank’s brutal double-murder only moments later.

Karen wonders why Jones kept this to herself, but it doesn’t matter now.

She’s stumped once she’s done scrolling through the pictures. What she wouldn’t do to be able to talk to Ben Donovan by herself…

 

* * *

 

“Someone was _following you_?”

Karen sighs. She should’ve known when she arrived at Matt’s apartment and had found him shirtless and bleary-eyed that she’d probably woken him up, and now he’s in the sort of mood where he’ll argue with her instead of helping. “You realize this was ages ago, right? You’re _in_ some of the pictures,” she adds emphatically, remembering the photos of their tense conversation in front of the police station. “There was nothing you could do to stop it.”

“But you’re here now,” he says shortly. “For my help, I presume.”

“Ben Donovan was the one who hired the PI,” Karen says. “Fisk’s lawyer.”

Matt looks stricken. “It’s my fault.”

Karen resists the urge to roll her eyes (she’s pretty sure he’d be able to hear that) and wonders why he’s so willing to nail himself to every single cross in the city. “Maybe, maybe not, but I wanted to talk to him --”

“Absolutely not,” he interjects.

“-- and obviously that’s not possible,” she continues with an edge of impatience, “So then I thought of someone who might be able to… intimidate him…”

Matt's expression transforms from one of obstinance to one of grim satisfaction. “You want help from Daredevil?”

Maybe it had been a long time coming. Karen had spent many weeks, months even, praising the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen and thinking of him as a good guy. Matt Murdock had always been a separate entity from the hero who had saved her from multiple tight spots, and when he’d revealed his alter-ego to her, it had been hard for her to merge their identities in her mind.

She’d fallen out of love with Matt Murdock a long time ago, but she’d never stopped believing in Daredevil.

“Yes,” she says in a low voice. “I want to know why he was hired, why Fisk had me followed, and who else might have the pictures.”

Matt’s grinning now, it’s not an overly joyful smile, but it’s some kind of happiness nonetheless. “Okay. I’ll talk to him tonight.”

 

* * *

  

That night, for the first time in months, she has a nightmare.

She’s in her old apartment -- her _old_ old apartment, the one she’d lived in when she’d killed Wesley. Wilson Fisk is sitting in her kitchen, drinking whiskey and waxing poetic about destructive fires and cleansing rains, spinning a butcher knife on her kitchen tabletop.

She’s not scared this time. She watches Fisk warily from her bed, and when she glances down at her hands, she’s clutching her gun. When he lunges for attack, she simply lifts the gun and fires.

He glares up at her with bared teeth as blood pours from the wounds in his chest, but when he opens his mouth, it’s not Fisk’s voice that comes out.

_The moment you decide you’re ready to compromise is the moment I stop fighting for you!_ he bellows triumphantly, then drops dead on her bedroom floor.

She wakes up shaking and angry, wondering when she started confusing the monsters in her dreams with the ones in her nightmares.

 

* * *

  

Matt shows up only a few moments after Karen has decided she can’t go back to sleep. She’s poring over a news article about the murder of some gangsters in Queens (and has just determined it wasn’t the work of the Punisher) when he knocks on her door. His expression is grim even under the Daredevil mask.

“Fisk told his lawyer to look into all three of us,” he says as soon as Karen shuts the door behind him. “Donovan hired three different PIs to tail each of us. The ones for me and Foggy were clean, they didn’t catch us doing anything out of the norm. But you…”

Karen swallows and sinks onto the couch, remembering the diner, the scene that her tail had witnessed.

“He was accosted by a woman on his way to Rikers,” Matt continues. “Claims she threw his car into oncoming traffic after ripping off his driver's side door. He wasn’t lying, at least his heartbeat didn't make it sound like he was lying, so either he’s crazy or we have a future Avenger amongst us. She took all of his files and told him to stop the tails or she’d be back to kill him.”

Ripped off his door? Was that… was that _Jessica_?

“He said he was too afraid to tell Fisk that he’d been mugged, so instead, he lied. He told Fisk that he’d reviewed the files personally and that all three of us were clean. As you and I know, he was only right about Foggy in that respect.”

It’s the first time Matt’s mentioned Foggy in months, which is why Karen ignores the subtle jab about her covert dealings with Frank. She clears her throat and asks, “Did he mention how the photo might’ve gotten to the Russians?”

Matt nods. “The guy he hired has a history of selling off his finds to the highest bidder. Once he found out he’d been accidentally surveilling the Punisher, he probably floated the information to some of the local gangs. The Russians have money, they would’ve paid top dollar.”

It’s not comforting, but it makes sense. After all, the fact that three hit squads had been sent after Frank in the course of a week, while none had turned up at Karen’s doorstep, had always been a pretty clear sign that she was never the target. Maybe she really is in the clear.

“There’s more,” Matt adds. “The lawyer accidentally let it slip that Fisk has plans to use Frank as some kind of puppet in the future.”

Karen snorts. “Does Frank seem like someone’s puppet to you?”

Of course, she’s constantly forgetting about Matt’s unbending pessimism toward Frank, as if criminals deserve second chances but Frank’s too far gone to save. He shakes his head solemnly and mutters, “I don’t know.”

That's not the Matt Murdock that always wanted to fight for the little guy. This shell of a man is jaded, desensitized, and maybe even depressed. 

“You’re not the same, you know,” she says sharply, and it catches his attention as he twitches his head away from her. “You seem... Darker. Lonelier.”

He turns away from her. “It’s easier this way.”

“On who?” she asks incredulously. “Clearly it’s not working for you, you’re completely isolated from society. And Foggy, I just saw him the other day -- he's just as sad as you are. When was the last time you saw him?”

He inhales deeply and bites down on his feelings like a good little repressed Catholic. She supposes that's enough of an answer.

“I think you two need each other,” she says softly. “I think this is proof of that. And there’s nothing wrong with a superhero needing to lean on his best friend every once in a while.”

“He doesn’t approve of what I do,” Matt says hollowly. “How I spend my nights.”

“Yeah, it made you a pretty shitty business partner,” she agrees with a little laugh. “But maybe if you guys just try being friends again… Maybe he’ll be able to come around.”

He looks like he’s considering it, but Karen can’t force him to grow up and talk to his friend. He nods once, then starts for the door. “You be careful, okay?” he says urgently. “I know you trust Frank, but once Fisk is out --”

“Frank’s not really in the picture anymore,” she says awkwardly, standing up to walk Matt to the door. “He blew out of town a while ago, made it seem like… like he wasn’t gonna be back.”

Matt has the balls to look happy about this piece of news. “Still. We’re all gonna be in the crosshairs. Watch your back.”

She agrees, giving him one last hug before she lets him out of her apartment. Once he’s gone, it feels colder, emptier, like a chapter had just closed on her life and she hadn’t even realized it as it was happening.

If life were fair, she’d be in love with Matt, and the name Frank Castle wouldn’t mean anything to her.

 

* * *

  

Over the next few weeks, during downtimes in research or writing, or as she’s laying in bed trying to fall asleep, her mind wanders back to those photos, to the PI, to the odd culmination of the case.

Matt was so sure that Frank was some part of Fisk's grand plan to fix the city. “A puppet,” those were his words, as if Frank has any sort of strings attached to him in this world. Anyone he cared about is dead.

Except for one person.

But there’s no reason to believe Fisk would know about Karen’s connection to Frank, or that he’d know to exploit it. It seems even less likely that Frank would commit heinous crimes just to keep her safe. In fact, his determined distance from her makes more sense, it seems like a pragmatic way to keep that particular string from being revealed to Fisk, lest he pull on it and force Frank to make a tough decision.

It's terribly sobering, the thought that Frank's absence will be indefinite... That he might never return. She'd assumed he'd be back one day soon, sitting in a back booth at her favorite diner or leaving her a note to meet him on some rooftop. If Fisk breaks out, if Frank is in danger, he'd never risk pulling Karen into the mess. 

What if the last time she saw Frank was the last time she'd  _ever_ see him?

She thinks about possible connections in Fisk’s growing network. If he’s angling for a legal release from prison, it stands to reason that he would emerge into a new web of lies and corruption, starting with his double-talking lawyer, Ben Donovan.

She starts compiling the files before she really realizes what she’s doing. It begins with one manila folder containing a list of Donovan’s other known clients; before long, it’s a green legal file thick with evidence of his dealings, his comings and goings from Rikers, and his known associates. Karen doesn’t even admit it to herself until she’s filled a cardboard box with information about the possible network, both inside and outside of Rikers.

She’s compiling a case against Wilson Fisk.

 

* * *

 

Her immediate thought, when the hands come out to grab her, is that she has her gun in her purse.

Her second thought is that Wilson Fisk had sent these men.

Her third thought is that she’s not going to die tonight.

It had been a long, arduous day at work, with Ellison in rare form as half the departments had missed their deadlines. Karen had been forced to edit her story a total of six times in the last four hours, and she had left the _Bulletin_ with the beginnings of a stress headache pressing on her brain as rain poured down in sheets.

That's why she isn't as observant as she usually is. As Frank would say, she’d neglected to watch her six.

Two men catch her just around the corner from the office and yank her right off the sidewalk, dragging her into an alley with one dirty hand over her mouth. She struggles as hard as she can, but she’s rewarded with two hard punches to the face, and that takes away her fight for a second. She registers the gleam of a blade in the light of a nearby streetlamp, but she can’t scream or twist away as it comes slicing down into her abdomen.

White-hot pain courses through her body as she bites down on the hand out of instinct. A voice curses in another language and pulls away, backhanding her hard enough to send her into the stone wall. She cries out as her arm hits the wall at the wrong angle, but as she's huddled on the wet ground, she’s able to wrap her hand around the gun in her purse.

One of them kicks her in the ribs, and then she's yanked up by her hair as the blade in the other man’s hand lands a second time.

She screams this time, a blood-curdling scream that pierces through the rain. They both start yelling at her incomprehensibly, but she twists away and switches off the safety on her Bersa as she lifts it up and shoots one of them in the chest at point blank range.

She’s screaming for help before he even hits the ground. He’s choking on blood and rainwater as the second man, the one with the knife, hesitates for a fraction of a second as he glares down at Karen.

“You’re dead anyway, bitch,” he mutters in a thick Russian accent before he takes off running down the alley, only seconds ahead of three passersby who round the corner and gasp when they find Karen bleeding out on the ground.

Two of the men immediately apply pressure to her wounds and coax her to drop her gun as the third one calls 911. She’s dazed and crying, her brain desperately trying to make sense of what had just happened as her hand refuses to relinquish her gun.

She remembers a story in the papers, something about Russians in Brooklyn, and her last cogent thought before she passes out is that Frank was somehow connected to all of this.


	6. chapter six

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They’re all terrified. And the last kid Frank talked to was his daughter, the day she’d been killed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WARNINGS for references to child abuse (nothing graphic or descriptive, but triggering nonetheless)

Few things can induce Frank into a blackout rage; he thinks child slavery is probably at the top of that short list.

He’s crouched on a rooftop, staring down in paralyzed horror at the scene below him: six children, stood shivering in a row in the pouring rain, on the front lawn of a ratty old house in Bushwick.

One of the guards whistles, and a moment later, a fat bald fuck waddles onto the porch and stares down his bulbous nose at the goods.

Frank immediately recognizes the man: Leon Rastovich, head of the Brighton Beach Russians, and apparently a much sicker fuck than Frank’s research had pegged him for, as he can now clearly see the unmistakable look of lust upon the twist’s face. He watches as Rastovich points to a girl on the end, and she’s whisked inside while the men load the other five children back into the van.

Blackout status: upgraded from child slavery to child prostitution.

(That’s the moment, Frank would later admit to himself, that he decided everyone in that house was going to die.)

Blackout rage is useless to those children; he needs to be methodical, almost surgical, in order to avoid collateral damage. But he has a tough decision to make.

It’s sheer numbers, at this point. He could save five children or bust into that house and save one.

Or he could do both.

He follows the van to the warehouse that’s just around the corner. Knowing what they use the warehouse for now, Frank worries that there might be more children inside.

He walks right in through the side door and takes out the driver as he’s opening the van door, snapping his neck before the man can make a noise. He glances inside the cab, no passenger, so he opens the sliding door and grabs one of the men by the front of his shirt, throwing him out of the vehicle so forcefully that he crumbles against the cinder block wall, out cold.

The third man has his gun pointed at Frank when he turns back around, and the children start screaming when it fires, but his aim is shit and he nicks the top of Frank’s shoulder -- the same arm where he'd sustained a bullet wound only a week prior. It's like they all pull their shots to the right or something.

So much the worse for that guy, who gets kicked backward through the window as three more men come rushing in through some back office, firing at random.

“Heads down!” Frank yells at the kids, hoping they speak English and aren’t already in shock. No time to check, though, as he runs around the back of the van with his Beretta in hand.

It ends in quick succession, four shots between three men, and Frank sustaining no additional injuries. He marches back to the office, where he finds one last Russian goon cowering. He lets out a cry and puts up his hands when he spots the skull on Frank’s chest.

“English?” Frank grunts.

“Y -- yes,” the man stammers.

“Are you selling these children?”

The man’s eyes go even wider.

“Who else besides Rastovich?” Frank demands, aiming the Beretta at him.

“No one!” the man cries. “Just Rasto and his mother!”

 _Mother_ … Frank pulls out a cell phone, one that he’d gotten off a body in an alley eight months ago, one that’s still bearing a picture. He holds the screen up in front of the man’s face. “You guys put out a hit on me? Why?”

“Just orders!” he insists. “They don’t tell us why! We follow orders!”

“Who ordered the hit?” he demanded.

“Rasto! Rasto ordered hit!” The man is sobbing now. “We don’t ask why. We don’t know!”

He’s not even middle management, and he has no conviction. He was happy to sell children and pretend his hands weren’t dirty. His lip curling into a sneer, Frank doesn’t think twice about pulling the trigger.

He returns to the van, where he can hear the children crying softly. The man who had been thrown against the wall is stirring now, groaning as his legs twitch. Frank pokes his head into the van as he points his gun at the stirring Russian, who goes still with fright.

They’re all terrified. And the last kid Frank talked to was his daughter, the day she’d been killed.

He tries his best for a friendly voice, but he has the face of a brute and the voice of a cement mixer, so it’s not exactly comforting when he asks, “You kids know any songs?”

They stare up at him uncertainly, too shocked to even look at each other.

“Itsy Bitsy Spider?” he prompts. “You know that one?”

One of the kids, a boy who looks about six years old and six months underfed, nods. Frank nods back at him encouragingly. “Why don’t you sing it?”

The kid's eyes are wide and scared, and he bears absolutely no resemblance to Frank Jr, but Frank feels it in his gut all the same when his little voice tremulously starts the opening notes to the song. Frank continues to nod encouragingly, struggling to remain upbeat, until the rest of the kids join in.

“Keep singing,” he says gruffly. “Nice and loud so I can hear you. You stay here and sing, I’ll be right back.”

The Russian is trying to inch away when Frank walks up to him. He shows him the same photo from the cell phone as he sticks the barrel of the Beretta onto the man’s neck. “What do you know about this?”

“Punisher!” the man says with a spiteful smile. This one has conviction.

“Who ordered the hit?”

“Who do you think?” the man growls, jamming his chin down on the gun. “Do it!”

Not with the children singing only ten feet away. Instead, he unsheathes his knife and does a nice, quick cut across the throat.

The image of blood soaking down a Russian's formerly crisp, white shirt as children sing, “Down came the rain and washed the spider out...” Well, that's something that recurs in Frank's nightmares for a while. 

 

* * *

 

Ten minutes later, under a deluge of rain, someone parks a van in front of the 83rd Precinct and shoots a gun into the air. Officers would later report that five orphaned children were discovered in that van, all telling a story about a savior with a white face on his chest.

 

* * *

  

Frank, meanwhile, returns to that house in Bushwick.

The guards were still standing at-ease on the porch, untrained and unaware, which meant Frank’s little massacre hadn’t gotten back to Rastovich.

Four easy sniper shots, even in the pouring rain, and the people inside probably didn’t hear a thing.

He’s possessed by the idea of rescuing the last one, of ending this operation once and for all. It feels too easy, too small potatoes for a group that had tailed him nearly 18 months ago, but Frank can’t risk something happening to that little girl while he tries to gather more intel on her captors.

Strategizing would be nice, but it’s not always practical.

So he storms the house, armed with his MK-11, his Beretta, and the three handguns strapped to different limbs. He gets in three good headshots on some Russian thugs before he clears the front of the house, and then he encounters Rastovich in the dining room, having supper with five of his closest friends… All of whom are packing.

A firefight erupts, and there’s something to be said about dilapidated old Bushwick houses -- maybe lead paint and asbestos can stop bullets, or maybe Rastovich’s four men (and one woman) are as shitty with their gun sights as their bodyguards. Either way, they run out of ammo way before Frank does, and he’s managed to take out two of them in the process.

Rastovich is sitting serenely, smiling at Frank, while his two associates are still pointing their empty guns at him. One of them, the man on the left, is Alexei Kurtzkova, the right-hand man whose son-in-law had followed Frank into a dark alley a few months ago.

“I have questions for you, Rastovich,” Frank says, pulling up his sniper rifle.

“I’m afraid I am not taking questions, Punisher,” Rastovich says lazily.

Frank responds by putting a bullet in the thigh of the associate to his right. The man doubles over, screaming, as blood pours out of the hole.

“Why did you order a hit on me?” Frank bellows over the man’s cries.

Rastovich, damn him, is still grinning. “Why? With the Punisher gone, Hell’s Kitchen is ripe for the taking.”

“Bullshit,” Frank snaps. “Your business was running just fine out here.”

“A businessman always has an eye on expansion,” he demurs, waving a hand in the air.

“You were tailing me, you had a professional following me,” Frank snarls. “Eighteen months ago. I want to know why!”

Rastovich barely glances at Kurtzkova; it’s so fractional that a less observant man wouldn’t have noticed, but oh, Frank noticed. “I didn’t pay for your tail, Mr. Castle,” he says, grinning widely. “I just paid top dollar for the result.”

“I want the name!” Frank bellows, swinging the gun to point it at Kurtzkova, but that’s when the cast iron skillet hits the back of Frank’s head.

He’d forgotten about the mother.

His brain is pounding and she’s screaming like a banshee and there’s a terrible commotion, but Frank moves on autopilot as he waits for his head to stop spinning. As soon as his vision clears, he sees the mother impaled on the end of his switchblade, her eyes wide with surprise.

And the other three had fucked off through a broken window, a trail of blood leading off the porch and into the rain-soaked yard. In the distance, he hears a car roaring away, but he’s too disoriented to pursue it immediately. He pushes the mother off of him and she falls to the ground with a loud thud. He collapses against the wall, trying to get his bearings.

By the time he’s well enough to move, that car must be halfway to Manhattan. Cursing, Frank pushes forward and trudges up the stairs in search of the girl.

He finds her in the second bedroom, weeping, her hands bound to the metal bedframe with some rope. She's all eyes, just as underfed as the other five, and her hair hangs in greasy clumps around her face, but she looks otherwise unharmed.

“Are you okay?” he asks softly, but it comes out in a rasp, and she gasps and lifts her watery eyes to him. He must look monstrous, because she buries her face in her hands and starts sobbing.

“What’s your name?” he tries again, coming to sit beside her on the bed, but not too close. She’s only five or six years old, still a baby. But no longer innocent.

“Leah,” she cries into her hands.

“Leah,” he says, swallowing the lump in his throat. “I’m Frank. I know those men were mean to you, but I promise, they’re not gonna be mean to you again.”

She lifts her head up hopefully. “Really?”

“Yes.”

She contemplates it for a second, her eyes lingering on the blood on his clothing, the skull on his chest, his brutish face. But she's seen some things, she's looked into the eyes of killers and rapists, and even at her young age, she knows how to find them. Whatever she sees in Frank's eyes, it doesn't scare her. She lifts her chin in a show of confidence. “Okay.”

“I’m gonna get you out of here, and I’m gonna get you safe,” he says quickly as he unties the ropes around her wrists. “But I need you to close your eyes, and I need you to keep 'em closed until I say to open 'em.”

She nods her understanding, and he picks her up like he’d done with his own daughter so many times. Her tiny body curls in his arms, too small for her height, and she squeezes her eyes shut.

It sends his heart hammering so loudly that it must be like a signal beacon to Red somewhere in Manhattan.

They make it all the way to the front door before Frank discovers another obstacle.

Six men are standing on the front lawn, having just poured out of another panel van. Frank’s appearance must’ve shocked them, because their weapons aren’t drawn and their eyes are wide.

More men who think they’re soldiers.

He uses the moment of confusion to duck back into the house and drop Leah behind a couch. “Keep your eyes shut and cover your ears,” he instructs. “I’ll be right back.”

“Frank!” she cries in fear, her eyes still squeezed shut.

“I promise I’ll be right back,” he says urgently, patting her knee reassuringly.

When he gets back to the front door, there are only five of them on the front lawn.

He chooses his H&K, a recent addition to his arsenal. The handgun is much easier to aim around the doorjamb as he uses the walls for cover. He takes out three of the guys before he has to reload, and the other two have made it up on the porch, forcing Frank to resort to hand-to-hand.

Again, they’re not military trained. If they’d had brains in their heads, they would’ve turned around and gone home. But they chose to work for a monster, and Frank has no qualms about permanent solutions to that conundrum.

One is dispensed of with a broken neck, the other catches a .45 to the eye.

That’s when he hears Leah’s scream from inside: “Fraaaaaaaank!”

The sixth one, the only one with any cunning in his pea brain, is holding a sobbing Leah up as a human shield. Frank immediately tosses his gun and puts up his hands, surrendering himself at gunpoint for only the second time in his life.

“I’m here, Leah,” he says in a calming voice. “It’s gonna be all right.”

She cries in response, and the guy sneers and hoists her up a little higher as his finger squeezes around the trigger of his shitty Russian handgun.

It’s all the opportunity Frank needs; he lunges at the guy, who drops the girl in surprise and takes the full force of Frank’s body as they tumble to the floor. They engage in a tussle, but it doesn't take much for Frank to overpower him. Possessed by rage, he starts pummeling. The guy is unconscious in seconds, and he’d be dead with one or two more hits, but Frank suddenly remembers that she's watching.

He stands up, his fists covered in blood, his eye still swollen from the other night, his new bullet wound now bleeding, and looks at her tentatively. “I’m sorry. I promised --”

“Frank!” she cries, and suddenly she’s hugging his leg tightly, holding on with what little strength she has left, sobbing as she tries to articulate her thanks.

She's not his daughter. It takes him a moment to remember that.

“It's okay,” he whispers soothingly, reaching down to pick her up. She throws her arms around his neck and buries her face in his shoulder as he carries her out of the house and into the rain. "You're fine. Everything's gonna be fine. I promise."

“Thank you!” she keeps muttering over and over again. He's not used to it; no one ever thanks him anymore. He'd forgotten what it felt like.

A hero. Just for tonight.

 

* * *

 

“Need the number for that nurse you care so much about.”

Red cocks his head, a faint smile playing across his face. “You get beat up, Frank?”

Frank scowls and glances back at Leah, who is curled up in the backseat of the car Frank had 'borrowed' from a neighbor in Bushwick. It had taken him 45 minutes to get into the city, and her adrenaline had long since worn off.

“Thought you could sense things, Red?”

He listens then, and seems to pick up her weakened heartbeat. “What did you do?”

“Busted up a child prostitution ring,” Frank says succinctly. For a brief moment, maybe even a fraction of a second, Red looks pleased -- almost as if, in this case, he's perfectly fine with Frank's methods.

Frank doesn't have time for this song and dance, so he prompts, “Name. Number.”

Red sighs. “Claire Temple. She just got reinstated at Metro General on the night shift, I’m not sure she’d be willing to risk --”

“I’m sure she’ll risk this,” Frank says confidently, turning his back on Red.

 

* * *

  

It turns out Claire Temple is formidable. She knows _exactly_ who Frank is, she doesn’t _appreciate_ his methods of vigilantism, and she’s had _just about enough_ of idiot vigilantes in her life, _thank you very much_.

But she says all of this as she examines the frail girl that had been curled in Frank’s arms when he’d walked into the ER moments ago. Leah is now set up in a private room, hooked up to an IV drip as Claire checks her vitals.

“She’ll be fine,” she concludes bluntly, fixing Frank with that no-nonsense stare that must’ve endeared her so much to Red. (Oh, right, he can’t see the stare.) “She’s weakened and she’ll need to be on a drip for a few days before we can build up her immune system, but we’ll take care of her. Extra security.”

He hesitates. He’d had no intention of staying with the girl, even the sight of her is an unspeakable trigger, but leaving her feels wrong, too.

“You should go,” Claire says with a little more softness around her edges. “You’ll just attract unwanted attention to her. I’ll give updates to our… mutual friend… You can check up on her that way.”

“I don't want him to go!” Leah says faintly, staring up at Frank beseechingly.

Claire's face creases in sympathy as she glances back up at Frank, clearly wondering what he'll decide.

He can't stay. He's not a savior or a martyr, and he's no longer a father. That's why he'd brought her here, to someone he would theoretically trust through association, because dropping Leah at the police precinct after all of his promises had seemed too cruel even for Frank.

“I'm sorry, Leah,” he says gruffly.

He’s almost to the door when Leah cries his name. “Don’t leave me!”

“I have to,” he says. “I kept my promise. They’ll never hurt you again. But you wouldn’t be safe with me. You’ll get help here.”

She’s inconsolable, trying to climb out of the bed and run to Frank. “I need to sedate her,” Claire says in a low voice, so Frank walks to her bedside and pushes Leah back down, smiling at her the same way he’d smiled at his daughter when he tucked her into bed every night.

“You're gonna wake up feeling better, and this whole nightmare will be behind you. What did I tell you?” he murmurs as Claire injects the sedative into the tube in Leah’s arm. “Everything’s gonna be okay.”

Leah nods bravely, still crying, and Frank stands there with her little hand in his until she falls asleep.

 

* * *

 

He sees it on the TV in the waiting room as he’s exiting the hospital: Leon Rastovich turned himself in earlier this evening, confessing to charges of murder and child prostitution.

That’s how the asshole escapes Frank’s fate for him.

For now.

 

* * *

  

He goes back to his apartment in Bensonhurst and sleeps for three days.

He hasn’t been this emotionally exhausted since he was recovering from a gunshot wound to the head. With Rastovich in custody, most of his team dead, and his associates gone to ground, Frank listens to his body and lets himself sleep.

It’s still raining when he leaves his apartment again, like the world is trying to wash away the filth left behind by the events of the week. He keeps his head down until he’s in the bar in Brighton Beach, but he catches the eye of the bartender, who gets nervous when he recognizes Frank. His eyes dart to the end of the bar, and Frank follows his gaze.

Alexander Baranovich Formichenko is nursing a glass of vodka, and in front of him is a bottle bearing a red label and a white star. The good stuff.

Frank nods at the barman, then turns and leaves, intending to put Brighton Beach and the Russians in the rear view mirror.

He's walked two blocks in the rain when he hears his name. He turns, expecting to see Red, but instead he’s facing Matt Murdock, erstwhile attorney at law, his glasses askew and his suit soaked from the rain.

“Murdock,” Frank grunts, squinting at the other man. Something was wrong. “Don’t you own an umbrella?”

“It’s Karen,” Matt says, his expression grave. “She’s in the hospital.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contains multiple references to the Punisher comics arc "Mother Russia" by Garth Ennis.
> 
> Also, writing Claire Temple was way too much fun.


	7. chapter seven

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Do feelings fade with time?
> 
> Frank had been terrified of the idea. He was scared of forgetting, of losing the memories of the emotions as each day slipped away. But stories of cookie crumbs on piano benches, of toy dinosaurs and one batch, two batch, had demonstrated that he was wrong. He fights through the nights in constant pain because he feels too much, because the memories are too strong, and because the real agony is that there will never be a day that they fade away and leave him in peace.

She should be dead. She has multiple stab wounds, a broken arm, and several abrasions, but it was that fucking .380 that saved her. They’d tried to kill her quietly, under cover of rain, but she’d fought back and put a bullet in the chest of the same man that Frank had shot in the leg. Then she’d managed to scream loud enough that the other one ran away into the night.

She wasn't combat trained, she hadn't grown battle-weary on the unforgiving streets of the tough neighborhoods in the city. Her battles should've been in courts, in papers, in barbs traded with intellectuals in positions of power; after all, her weapons far exceed Frank's when they're all laid out for comparison. She always came off as untouched by the filth that rises up like stench from the garbage that is the city, but Frank knows more than anyone that her halo has been tarnished by the blood of lesser men. Doesn't make it any less of a halo, though.

Anyone else would be dead, because the Russian mob doesn't suffer fools and it doesn't leave survivors. The doctors will tell her she was lucky; Frank would tell her she was tough and resourceful. Anyone that puts a bullet into a mob assassin is someone to be feared, not pitied.  

Frank had known rage only three days ago, the sort of fury that compels a body to act before a mind. He'd only ever felt it in battle, a sort of numbness tinged with malice, just enough to stay motivated, and then it was over and all he felt was... nothing. He always felt nothing. That was when he'd think of Maria, of Lisa and Frank Jr, and remind himself that his humanity lay in other arenas. With them gone, he'd lost that compass... And then he'd found it again. 

And as he looked at Matt on that street corner, faced with the possibility of losing it all over again, he realized a few things in quick succession, but most of all, he registered his quiet rage, the kind that turned inward and waged war on his consciousness. His mind acted before his body, and Matt registered every single nuance of Frank's disposition, his head twitching from side to side as he listened. 

“The fact that you haven't decked me means you're not angry enough,” Frank growled, and he had only a glimpse of Matt's aghast expression before he was turning on his heel to find a cab. 

 

* * *

 

Frank arrives at Metro General less than an hour after leaving Matt standing on the street corner. He strolls right in through the ER entrance and ducks into the closest breakroom, concealing himself from view as nurses come and go. Finally, Claire walks in, rubbing her hands with sanitizer as she faces the lockers. She stops abruptly, then turns slowly, her eyes landing on Frank as he emerges from the corner.

“You’re a loud breather,” Claire says flatly, putting a hand on her hip. “That’s a good thing. I’m sick of you types sneaking up on me.”

“Broken nose, at least sixteen times,” Frank says gruffly, pointing at his face. “Where is she?”

“Still in recovery. She’s already gained back some weight and she started solid foods this morning. We’ve been looking into foster options for her, but it’s not gonna be easy. And she’s been asking about you --”

It takes him a minute, it takes him a  _full goddamn minute_ , to realize that he and Claire hadn’t been talking about the same person. “No,” he says a little too loudly, agitated. “Not Leah.”

Claire frowns, drawing her head back in surprise. “Then… who?”

It takes every bit of self control he possesses not to put his fist through a wall as he says her name for the first time: “Page. Karen Page.”

Claire’s frown deepens, then disappears as clarity takes over. “Right. She was the legal secretary for your --” She clears her throat. “I’m an ER nurse. I treated her when she came in, and when she was stabilized, I called Matt. I don’t know what happens after they go to ICU.”

“Room number.”

“You can’t get on the ward anyway, it’s no use if I get you her room number --”

He pulls out his H&K and taps it against his thigh, an unconscious attempt to intimidate this woman, but he’s miscalculated. Claire's expression hardens and she gives him a disdainful look as she says, “You pull a gun on me, and I’ll never help you again.”

He believes it. They stare each other down for a second, then he reholsters the gun and fixes his eyes on the ground. “Please,” he says softly.

Temple, she’s tough as nails, but she’s not heartless. She tilts her head and sighs. “How can I trust that you’re not going up there to kill her?”

Frank glares at her hatefully, unable to come up with the correct words to describe how misguided her question was. She blinks, studying him, then smiles slowly. “Ah. Okay. Well in that case, Mr. Punisher, I’ll get you that room number, so long as you don't give my name when you're inevitably caught.”

She's a little too observant for his tastes. 

 

* * *

 

Do feelings fade with time?

Frank had been terrified of the idea. He was scared of forgetting, of losing the memories of the emotions as each day slipped away. But stories of cookie crumbs on piano benches, of toy dinosaurs and _one batch, two batch,_ had demonstrated that he was wrong. He fights through the nights in constant pain because he feels  _too_ much, because the memories are  _too_ strong, and because the real agony is that there will never be a day that they fade away and leave him in peace.

He's a victim of it now, years after the first time he'd ever laid eyes on her. Violence, trials, incarceration, multiple periods of painful separation, and and only a handful of intimate moments to remember her by, but somehow she's become the center of his being. He's always thought of himself as carrying pieces of her around with him, but until now, he'd never realized just how many pieces of himself he's left with her. Slipping into the ICU room is like finding his peace again, even as his soul screams against the contact. Being here is somehow both blissful and agonizing.

It's surreal to think that it's been four and a half months since he last saw her, but maybe that's because she's never been far from his mind. 

She’s bruised, battered, scraped, pale. She’s turned away from him slightly, laying on her right side, her eyes closed and her broken arm propped on her hip. The monitors beep rhythmically around her, seemingly keeping her alive.

She’d been upgraded to “serious,” according to Claire. That was good news, it meant they wouldn’t have to induce a coma. “It means you’ll be able to talk to her,” Claire had said with that hard edge of compassion.

But he stands frozen just inside the door, unable to move or think or plan. She looks so small, so diminished, not at all like the firecracker he’d met in this same hospital so long ago.

She stirs and her eyes flutter open, and when she sees him standing at the foot of her bed, she doesn’t even look surprised. “Hi, Frank.”

He says it around the lump that had formed in his throat as he stood there, as he fights the wave of tears that had sprung to his eyes: “M’am.”

“I wasn't paying attention --” she starts faintly.

“No, come on, don't do that, no,” he mumbles, barely audible, the words trailing off the tip of his tongue as he fades into watchful silence. 

“I had been so good about it,” she continues ruefully. “I knew you weren't always going to be around to save my life.” 

It comes crashing down with those words. He turns away, blinking rapidly, trying not to let the thoughts of blame and regret invade his mind. It's not his mission. He doesn't have room for this. 

When he regains his composure, he faces her again, and she’s looking at him with a mixture of deep sorrow and relief. “I killed one.”

“Yeah. Yeah,” he says, nodding his head, not giving an inch. “And the other?”

“Russian. Brown hair, brown eyes, short. Scared.” She grimaces. “I think I scratched his face.”

“Yeah. Okay,” he says, shoving his hands in his coat pockets.

“You gonna kill him?”

It was already a foregone conclusion, and Frank doesn’t lie to her. “Yeah. I am.”

She closes her eyes and nods, rolling back onto her uninjured side, turning away from him. He stands there for a while, five or six very long minutes, just standing in her presence. He needs the comfort, needs to know that she’s still there, still breathing, so that he knows his battle plan. Is it revenge or is it redemption? Which will compel him when he comes face-to-face with the man who tried to kill her?

Her eyes open and she turns her head to smile at him. “You came to say goodbye?”

It's absurd, he thinks, that she's the one recovering from a horrible attack of her mind and body, yet he's the one standing here shattered and so readable. He can't even break her gaze, he can only stare at her without any sense of what she's picking up from his features; he's probably an open book of devotion, affection, lust, all of the things he can't voice, even to himself.

“I loved you,” she says with a humorless laugh, and isn’t that the tragedy, that he’s always around these strong women who don’t cry? She sits there broken and busted but resilient and strong, holding her head high and admitting something that, surely, would rip him apart if he did it in turn. She says it like it’s a conversation piece, like “I love you” is as simple as the baseball scores, like it’s not the most painful and humiliating thing she could possibly feel, much less admit.

And it’s tempting to humiliate her, to treat her feelings as meaningless, the childish emotions of a blushing schoolgirl who got too attached to her savior. It would save him a lot of grief in the long run, to dismiss her feelings right now and make her feel small, so that she can fall into the comfort of hating him for the rest of her life.

He’s always walking that fine line, trying to decide if he should break her today just to keep her safe for tomorrow. But breaking her would be easy, and Frank’s never made the easy choice. 

Maybe he needs this, too.

“Yeah,” he says bluntly, because _he doesn’t lie to her_.

She had expected that, her smile growing. “I realized it when I thought I was gonna die. I loved you. I might still love you.” She shakes her head. “For the longest time, I had this image in my head, this alternate storyline of what we would’ve been like if we’d met in a different world, in a different universe. If we were different people.”

His hands ball into fists against his will, clenching on emotions he refuses to feel even as they touch his soul like waves on a shoreline.

“You never would’ve saved my life. I never would’ve pointed a gun at you. We wouldn’t have known any superheroes or villains. We would’ve been good, we would’ve been normal.” She looks right at him, her eyes hard and bright. “You would’ve been able to tell me you love me back, instead of making me tell myself.”

She says it without malice or anger. He wishes she felt either, or both, because he understands those emotions.

“It didn’t comfort me.” She’s crying now, the tears slipping down her cheeks. “There were no tangible changes. No loft in Soho. No kids, no dogs. No dinner parties with friends. No vacations to Italy. No lying in bed on Saturday morning and talking about all the errands we have to run.”

Yet it paints a vivid picture of a life neither of them wanted. Frank can picture it so easily, if he were less of a soldier and she were less of a fighter. Two very normal, somewhat boring people who look exactly like them. Two people that fell in love and overcame the obstacles.

But the day would inevitably come, as he sat at his kitchen table across from his beautiful wife, flanked by his two doting pit bulls, surrounded by the normal, happy life they'd built for themselves... The day would come where he would read the newspaper, or turn on the news, and Frank would think to himself,  _Something needs to be done_. 

“Instead, all I did was imagine your presence,” she continues, caught up in her own rendering of a life that feels all too possible, yet somehow unattainable. “It scared me, Frank. You made me feel safe around demons and monsters. You’re the kindest, most brutal face on a man who can’t be saved.” She sniffles. “Who can’t love me back.”

Oh, how she’s wrong about that. She doesn’t know how he’s taken to orientating himself around her, to recalibrating according to her perception of him. She doesn’t know that he would move heaven and earth, would kill Wilson Fisk and Daredevil himself, to make sure she kept breathing. It’s unsustainable, he knows that now. He can’t keep touching her life with his destruction if he loves her, because he can’t give her what she wants, and staying around means dooming her to a half-life, a tragic life where she loves with all her heart, and he does the same thing from a distance.

He does love her, as much as a monster like him can love anyone. But monsters aren’t meant to be in love.

“You can leave now, Frank,” she says in a choked, hollow voice. “I’ll be fine. I just needed to say it... I needed you to know.”

He believes it, just as he knows that nothing,  _nothing_  will compel him to darken her doorstep again. His heart is heavy, his bones ache, and he’s tired of fighting it. He’s tired of _feeling_.

He pauses at the door, wishing he could match her bravery and intensity. “It was my first smile,” he mutters without turning around, his voice breaking on the last word. “After… after it happened. You were my first smile.”

It’s all he can say.

 

* * *

 

She’d sensed Frank’s presence before she’d even woken up. It was like a strange connection between them, something she’d denied for months before she’d just given in. She remembered floating in and out of consciousness, the voices of the nurses, the rhythmic beeping of the machines, and then the whole world stopped when she opened her eyes to Frank. And suddenly she just couldn’t fight it anymore.

She doesn’t cry when he leaves. She knows he had left for the last time, that she would never see him again, but that part of her that felt weighted down by her conscience, the part that forgave him for his murders, the part of herself that had murdered another man… That part of Karen’s soul feels free now.

She doesn’t sense Matt when he slips into the room, but she supposes that’s part of his whole superhero thing. She only realizes he’s there when he touches her shoulder softly, and she’s shocked to see him in his Daredevil outfit, his gloved hand still outstretched.

“Are you okay?” he asks solemnly.

She shakes her head, sitting up dazedly. “Matt?”

“I’m sorry, Karen --”

“Don’t,” she says sharply, feeling a swell of agony. “Just… Don’t apologize, okay?”

He presses his lips together, in a physical effort to restrain himself, then nods curtly. “Was he here?”

“Half an hour ago,” she murmurs, then glances up at Matt. “He’s gonna kill the guy.”

He looks chagrined, but resigned. “I think he wanted me to kill him, today. Only for a second, you know. Then he turned into Frank again. He blames himself --”

“Yeah, there's enough of that going around,” Karen says dully.

Matt chuckles softly, though there's nothing funny about their situation. It was never funny, she supposes, but that never stopped them from laughing. Matt shifts his weight and cocks his head toward her. “I…” he starts, then turns his head the other way. “I want you back, Karen.”

She blinks, unsure if she heard him correctly, but he’s standing there with his ear turned to her, like he’s listening to her heartbeat, and slowly the words trickle into her consciousness. She’s too drugged and tired to think straight. “You -- you want me--?”

He grimaces. “That came out wrong. I mean… I want you back on my team. You and Foggy. I don’t want to… To do this alone anymore. If I keep going like this…” He trails off, his mouth twisting into a sad smile.

“You’ll turn into Frank,” she finishes softly, her heart swelling with grief for Frank, for Matt, for their messed up lives and hearts. “Yeah.”

“Crime fighting seems to be built into your DNA,” he continues with a grin. “I tried to talk you out of it, but you’re determined. And if you work with me, maybe I can keep you safer than this.” He gestures the length of her body.

She laughs, then immediately regrets it as pain knifes through her torso. “I killed a Russian, you know. Some people would call me a badass.”

“You sound like Frank,” Matt says with affection.

She smiles up at him, blinking back tears. “Thank you.”  

 

* * *

  

“You run with some very sketchy people, Ms. Page.”

Karen glances up at the nurse who had just entered her room. “Are you the nurse who…?”

“Who saved your life last night? Yeah,” she says, strolling forward and sticking out her hand for Karen to shake. “Claire Temple. Your friend might've mentioned me.”

“Matt Murdock,” Karen says immediately. “Yeah, he told me you called him as soon as I was admitted. He was just here an hour ago, trying not to apologize.”

“Matt never misses an opportunity to blame himself for the shit other people get themselves into,” Claire says sagely, crossing her arms and leaning back in her chair as Karen laughs. “But I’m talking about your other friend. The big one who tried to threaten me with a handgun.” 

Karen touches her fingers to her forehead, exasperated. “Frank.”

“Yeah. He’s a piece of work. But I wanted to check on you just to make sure he wasn’t sneaking up here to hurt you. My shift just ended or I would’ve been here sooner.”

Karen looks at Claire incredulously. “You thought he’d hurt me?”

Claire narrows her eyes like  _Karen_  is the crazy one. “He  _is_  the Punisher. The ones he doesn’t kill, I’m usually stuck stitching up on busy nights. Forgot to thank him for that one when I saw him.” She lifts her shoulders in a dubious shrug. “But I don’t know. I think he’s actually one of the good ones, in his own sadistic way.”

“You just said he pulled a gun on you,” Karen says slowly.

“Yeah.” She contemplates Karen for a second, then leans forward and adds in a conspiratorial tone, “But three nights ago, he brought in a little girl he’d saved from a prostitution ring.” She shakes her head grimly. “And I saw the way he talked to her. The man’s an animal, and he needs to be locked up, but he directs his sickness at the scumbags who deserve it.”

Her mind spinning, Karen asks, “Little girl? Is she still here in the hospital?”

 

* * *

 

Little Leah Doe -- she never knew her last name, so her chart has her listed as such until they can track down her original orphanage -- is sitting cross-legged on her hospital bed when Karen limps into the room the next day. She glances up from her coloring book, her wary eyes landing on Karen as she stiffens.

“Hi,” Karen says softly, waving to Leah with her good hand. “I’m Karen.”

The girl doesn’t respond, just continues to watch Karen suspiciously.

“I think you know a friend of mine,” Karen continues as she sinks into the chair beside Leah’s bed. “His name is Frank.”

Leah’s eyes go wide as a smile spreads across her face. “Frank! You know Frank? How do you know Frank?”

It warms her heart to see the little girl light up like a Christmas tree at the mere mention of Frank; in a weird way, it feels like Leah is the only person on the planet who could understand how Karen feels. “He --”

“Did he rescue you, too?” Leah asks excitedly.

Karen feels an unexpected swell of sadness as she smiles up at the little girl. “Yeah,” she manages, nodding. “Yeah, he saved my life.”

 

* * *

 

That night, Rastovich’s last known living associate -- a man named Kurtzkova, a short, brown-haired man bearing three fresh scratches on his cheek -- is found dead on the steps of the Midtown North Precinct. Cause of death: one perfectly placed sniper bullet to the heart.

 

* * *

 

Revenge or redemption?

Neither.

Frank Castle can't be redeemed. Frank Castle is dead.

Revenge is a poor motive, an emotional response that fades over time. Revenge is of no use to this city, not with crime at an all-time high and a justice system ill-equipped to deal with the consequences.

Punishment, though. He can deal in punishment. It's a good motivator, and it's what keeps him fighting.

He can't survive without the war.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter contained references to the Punisher comic arc "Long Cold Dark" by Garth Ennis. 
> 
> Thank you so much to everyone who read and commented along the way, it really helped me shape some of the finer points of this story. I should also thank my beta reader, also known as my husband, whose opinion on all things Frank Castle has been invaluable.


End file.
